Paris Was the Place (33 page)

“No.” I’m so glad I don’t know this, because I’ll never have to divulge it.

“Do you have any idea how much money she has on her?” the crew cut asks. “Plane tickets?”

“I have no idea of these things.”

“Do you have her writings?”

“Some.”

“Do you have any papers from your class that might indicate what her plans were? Did she reach out to family members about her intentions?”

“Not to my knowledge.” The letter Gita wrote in class for her grandmother. What’s in that letter? It must be in a file somewhere in my apartment. Maybe there’s other stuff that will implicate me. Maybe they’ll search and find a poem Gita wrote in class or a metro ticket stub, which will be enough to let them press charges. I want to get out of here and run home to search.

The police discuss the idea of surprising Gita at Kirkit’s aunt’s apartment somewhere near Orly. There’s excitement in the room and the scraping of chairs and more cigarette smoke. Sophie gives them the address, and everyone leaves to go find Gita. Then Sophie and I wait in her office the rest of the day. Long hours pass. I sit on the stool and read
Le Monde
and try to make myself invisible while Sophie comes and goes and runs the center and pretends I don’t exist. She seems to want me there so that she can ignore me.

Kirkit’s supposed to report to his kitchen job at three, but he never shows. I’m not under arrest exactly, but the police won’t let me go home and Sophie won’t even look at me. Gita isn’t at Kirkit’s aunt’s when the police get there. I try not to celebrate too loudly in my head. I’m afraid Sophie can read my mind and knows how I’m deceiving her. At five o’clock, when it’s clear that there’s no cook coming to make dinner, she says, “Willie, what did you and Gita think I was going to feed the girls tonight?” There’s none of her softness.

I hadn’t thought about dinner. I forgot there would be no cook. It’s an embarrassment—the girls need food. “You are not working here anymore,” Sophie says then. “Lord knows you did good here, but now you have done very bad. Go home, Willie, and wait for the police, because they will be coming for you.”

I have to call Sara from Sophie’s office so I wait for Sophie to go out into the hall. Then I reach for the phone. “You home? Can I come over?” It’s six o’clock. Almost twelve hours since I got to the center. I can’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t you dare cry.

“I’m ordering Chinese takeout. Rajiv’s away on a trip. What would you like, sweetness?”

“I’m not hungry.” Sophie walks back in and scowls at me. I whisper, “There’s been a problem here at the center.”

“What’s happened, Willie? Are the girls all right?”

“We’ll talk more when I get there.” But I don’t go to Sara’s. First I flag a cab out on Boulevard de Strasbourg and take it all the way home. Then I run up the stairs and unlock my door and fling it open and race into the bedroom. There’s a stack of files on the wooden bench next to the bureau—files of the girls’ poems. Drafts of testimonials. Writing prompts. Where’s Gita’s letter? I remember wanting to put it somewhere so I wouldn’t forget it if I ever actually made it to India. Where did I stash it? Come on, Willie. Where?

I keep a brown leather case in the top drawer of my bureau under my lingerie. This is where I hide my passport. And this is where I find Gita’s letters, the one to Moona and the one to her grandmother, written in a language I can’t decipher. I have no idea what they say. But I’ve found them. That’s what matters.

Then I run back out the open door to my apartment and down to the street and I find another taxi. Sara and Rajiv live in the fifteenth, on a wide residential street called Rue Lecourbe. They have the first floor of a three-story redbrick town house. I let myself in with a key I keep in my wallet. Sara sits on an overstuffed couch in the living room with her feet up on a camel cart. She’s got on her batik bathrobe, which is tied in front of the beach ball that is her baby. I lean down, and she kisses both of my cheeks. The scene looks so incredibly hopeful. I almost can’t believe it. “I’m not getting up,” she says. “Don’t ask me to get up. I’ll never get back down.”

I lie next to her on the couch and curl up my knees. “I’ve ruined everything. It’s something stupid. Something that Rajiv is going to be very angry with me for. So angry for.”

“Oh, boy. Tell me. Tell me what you’ve done.” She puts her hand on my right thigh.

“I let one of the girls at the asylum center escape. Gita’s gone.”

“You have not.” I look at her once. Her face has gotten red.

“No, I have, Sara, and she’s gone and we may never see her again. People are very angry with me.”

“People have every right to be mad at you, because what were you thinking? How is that girl going to last a night on the streets?”

I close my eyes. “You would have done it too, Sara. A boy from the kitchen at the center is helping her.”

“But do you know anything about this boy and where his family is and how he’s going to keep Gita safe? How old is this boy, anyway?”

In the sunlight, these questions had easy answers. But at night it seems much more unlikely that any of these things will work out the way Gita wants. “Nineteen. I think he’s nineteen, and he must be responsible. He’s a cook. He comes to work every day. I met him and liked him.”

“So we have a fifteen-year-old girl on the loose with a nineteen-year-old and no one has any money or anywhere to live that we’re aware of and you feel comfortable that everything’s going to work out.”

“Please don’t be mean very much longer. I helped her go. She wanted to go. How much longer are you going to be mad at me?” I want to keep Gita’s letters here at her apartment. I’ll slip them into one of the books on the shelves above the couch.

“What does Macon say?”

“Macon took everything he owned in my apartment and walked. He thinks if anyone in his office finds out that he’s been living with me, he’ll lose his job.” The starlings fly over the truck in Aix-en-Provence again. An orchestra of dark birds. The sound of so many flapping wings. We sit in the truck and we kiss. I’m completely over the top. I want to go back to Aix-en-Provence.

“Macon will come home.”

“He’s really incredibly furious at me.”

“You love him.”

“How do you know?”

“He’ll be back.”

“I’m supposed to go to India in a month, Sara. How can I do that? Gita is missing. Luke has a falling T cell count. Macon won’t speak to me. Maybe I’ll be arrested by then. I’d been trying to talk Macon into going with me. Now he’ll never go. Now he won’t even talk to me.”

“India. I forgot India. Wow.”

“Macon thinks I’m a liar.” I’ve lost him. I let him walk out. I could have tried to stop him. What’s wrong with me? I crave him. I crave looking at his face.

“I just don’t get where you thought it would help the girl to let her loose in this city.”

“They weren’t staying in Paris. I knew the boy she left with—the cook at the center, Kirkit—I knew he had an aunt with an apartment outside the city.”

“But doesn’t everyone know that if you do?”

“I’m just telling you they had a plan to meet at that apartment to get some things together.”

“Okay then.” Sara looks away and raises her eyebrows like she’s done with it. Like she can’t believe me. “What time are you taking
Luke in tomorrow?” She’s been following every step of Luke’s treatment with Dr. Picard. The AZT injections start in the morning. Some doctors think the drug is almost as good as a cure.

“Nine.”

“Why you and not Gaird?”

“Gaird has a huge day on the set, and Luke’s okay with it. They talked, and they both want me to take him.”

Sara nods. “The AZT will be good, but it’s highly, highly toxic. I’m worried about whether he can tolerate it. He’s so damn thin. If it goes well at the hospital, they should let you bring home a small supply. Then you or Gaird or I can do the injections at the apartment.”

A dark-skinned boy delivers the Chinese food. When I ask, he says he’s from Tibet and that he’s eighteen, but he looks twelve. Just about Pradeep’s age. I give him a wad of extra franc notes and he nods his head and leaves.

Sara opens the chow mein noodles on the camel cart. “Eat!” She waves her chopsticks at me.

“I’m not hungry. You haven’t met Kirkit, Sara. He’s a good boy. He’ll take care of her.”

Their apartment is full of black-and-white photos Rajiv has taken all over the world. Africa. India. Indonesia. Afghanistan. Some of the pictures are of Sara during the years they lived in London and worked at different refugee camps. My friend is tall and strong in every photo. I watch her eat and I try to siphon off a little of her strength. There’s no one who understands me better in the world except Luke.

“But there’s something I have to ask you, Sara.” She looks at me over the big bite of noodles she’s just wrestled from the carton. “Small favor. Gita wrote a letter. I don’t know what it says. To her grandmother in India, who we now think is alive. I have a feeling this letter might say good-bye. It might explain that Gita was planning an escape.”

“Where is it?” Sara talks with her mouth full. “The letter.”

“Well, that’s the thing. I have it with me. Two letters, actually. The other is to Gita’s friend.” I reach for the envelopes in my bag on the floor. “If I could just keep them here? Because I didn’t ask her to
write the letters. But it will look bad if this letter to her grandmother says what I think it says. And no one is really going to come looking for Gita. I mean the French police have much better things to do with their time.”

“Give them to me.” Sara puts her arm out. “Hand them over.” I pass them to her. She reaches up to the wooden shelf above her right shoulder and takes down
A Bend in the River
, in hardcover, by Naipaul. She slides the envelopes inside the middle pages. Then she tries to stand up. “There. Done. We don’t need to say another word about it. The baby and I are really tired.” She puts her hand on her belly. Her anger has dissolved. It always does eventually, if I just wait long enough. I want to hug her for how much I love her. For how honest she always is. For how much she seems to love me. All of me. “We need to sleep. You need to go home and sleep, too. There’s a lot more to talk about in the morning.”

“But I can’t. I didn’t sleep at all last night.”

“You have to try. You have to go home and lie down and try.” She gets up from the couch slowly, very slowly, by leaning back and pushing up with her legs first. Then she takes my hand and I pull her to standing. “Your heart was in the right place, Willow Pears. But not your head. Go home and wait for that French man to come back to you. Then apologize. Get down on your knees and tell him you’re sorry.” I can’t reach my arms around her belly so I hug her shoulders and press my face into her neck. A short, fierce hug. God I love her.

I walk out on Rue Lecourbe and flag another taxi and we drive east in the dark. I get back to Rue de la Clef and climb the three flights of stairs to my apartment and lie in my bed and miss Macon in a way that’s bottomless and real. I’ve taken him for granted and I’m alone now. He’s gone. I’ve taken him for granted. Why do I do this? I’m alone now in the apartment and there’s nothing good about it. It’s just lonely. I can’t believe this is how we live sometimes. How I live. Waiting for the person I love to call me. To show some sign. And he doesn’t. He won’t. I breached something too big. His profession. His life calling.

In the morning I have to stop at the long red light on Boulevard Haussmann. I adjust the rearview mirror. How does Luke see anything out of this tiny car? “Is your breathing okay today? Is there pain?”

“I’m good. Except for my throat. My throat hurts when I swallow.”

“Okay. Your throat. That’s odd. We can ask them to take a look.” We idle and idle and then we’re off again. First gear, second, and third. The stick shift feels miniature, almost pretend.

“Andreas called last night and gave me the numbers from some recent Norwegian AZT trial. Good numbers. He’s doing all this research for me. The disease is a mind game. A horrid little private conversation I have every day with myself. I look forward to going to the hospital now. Isn’t that sick? The trips consolidate. Organize all this fucking free-floating fear. Isn’t that pathetic? That I like going to the hospital?”

“No. Not pathetic. Smart. Self-preservation. And I like going to the hospital with you. I get it. We learn things. We feel better at the hospital. At least I do.”

“We’re supposed to get answers there. So all week long I look forward to getting the answers.”

“And medicine. We’re going to get new medicine.”

“I get lulled into thinking we’re truly doing something every time we drive to St. Louis. It’s like my life is sitting on the head of a fucking pin. I’ve waited all week for this drive. All week to see Dr. Picard. Do you see how pathetic my life has become?”

“Stop.” I’m speeding along next to the canal and I glance quickly over at him. He has his eyes closed.

“God I don’t want to talk about this anymore. So sorry I’ve droned on and on. I’m done now.” He opens his eyes and sits up. “How’s your student? How’s Gita now that the hearing got so messed up?”

“She’s gone.” I turn onto Boulevard Magenta. I’m beginning to know my way to the hospital.

“Gone? Back to India gone?”

“No, I’ve done something stupid.”

“What? What have you done?” He turns so he’s fully facing me while I drive, and I can’t avoid his eyes.

“Stop staring at me like that. I told you she was asking for my help.” We wait in front of the Canal St. Martin while a band of little children in raincoats are led across the street. The lilacs are gone. They were my favorite. But the irises and clematises are out. So much more serious and stately than the lilacs.

“Where is Gita now, Willie?” He won’t stop looking at me.

“She’s missing.” I look again in the rearview.

“Oh, man.”

“It’s a problem. I helped her walk away, and there have been problems.”

“You know, I’m actually worried about you. This is too much.”