The Book That Matters Most (23 page)

He was right, that doctor. The next week was worse than anything she had ever experienced. First that broken-glass feeling in her head and the cramping in her stomach. Then she began to throw up and shake and beg. “Please,” she said to anyone who came in to the room, “please, if you could just get me a little something.” She offered them her ATM passcode. “Take all the money,” she said, “just bring me a tiny tiny bit of smack.” When her teeth began to chatter so much that she bit her tongue, hard, someone came in and tied her to the bed. “We can fix this,” she tried to tell the orderly, but all he did was jam a cloth in her mouth. To keep her from hurting herself, he explained.

Miraculously, one afternoon she opened her eyes and realized that although every cell in her body ached, even though she felt hollow, she was not shaking or begging or puking. A nurse came in with a bag of clothes and ordered her to get dressed. It took Maggie a very long time to put on the mauve tracksuit made of shiny polyester that was in the bag. But once she did, the nurse helped her to walk to a room at the end of the hall. Her legs felt like they were made of Jell-O, and she slipped and slid along the pea-green speckled linoleum floor.

“The doctor will be in soon,” the nurse told her, gently settling her into a blue plastic chair, an IV still in her arm.

A thin wasted man in the chair beside her told her she could sign up and get drugs at a clinic, free.

“They are weak,” he said, “but they'll do.” He was missing most of his teeth.

“Oh, I just use them recreationally,” Maggie said, which was
the same thing she'd told a series of doctors who had come in with clipboards and serious faces.

“We all use them recreationally,” the man laughed.

He told her she was on the ward for drug addicts.

“What?” Maggie said. “That's ridiculous.”

The man tilted his chin toward her. “You have track marks that would stretch all the way to Marseille. Who are you kidding?”

She turned her face from him and thought instead of the Norwegian boy. Had he been the one who called for help? And where did he go? And what were they going to do with her now? Call the police? Call the American embassy? Call her parents?

A doctor came in, wearing her doctor coat and a stethoscope around her neck. She sat on the edge of Maggie's chair, close enough that Maggie could smell her heavy perfume.

“So Maggie,” the doctor said, looking at the papers on her clipboard, “you are American and you are a drug addict and you almost died.
Alors
. What should we do with you?”

“I'm an American
student
, studying here in Paris. And I am
not
a drug addict. I just like to party and I really need to get a better handle on that. I am always falling for the wrong boys and then doing bad things.”

The doctor looked at her, incredulous.

“Well, my dear, you will die if you keep doing these drugs. We've done all we could to make you better.” She stood abruptly. “So. Go back to your dormitory and eat a good dinner of steak and salad and drink lots of water and get rest. And resist the drugs.
Oui?
”

“Oui!”
Maggie said enthusiastically, because they were letting her walk out of here. No embassy. No parents. No jail.

The doctor brusquely removed the IV, and then made a little clucking sound with her tongue.

“I don't ever want to see you here again,” she said, and she walked away.

Maggie stood, her knees weak, and made her slow way outside. It was early morning, and the sky was streaked pink and red. It would be a hot day, she thought. She looked around, searching for something to orient her. A landmark or a street sign. But nothing looked familiar. She walked to the corner, stopped again to look around, still saw nothing familiar, and kept walking, until finally in the distance she saw the green pipes and blue ducts of the Pompidou Center. Relieved, she walked toward it. Nearby was the café where she'd seen Noah, and the bookstore with the beanbag chairs. She would have a big café au lait and an omelet and bread and then she would go into the bookstore and sink down in a beanbag chair, and read.

Ava

Ava called the man back right away, but it just went to voicemail, a robotic taped voice telling her to leave her name and number. She tried it again and again, until it became clear that the man was not going to answer. Why hadn't she asked him where he was? Where Maggie was? The word “missing” rang in her brain. Then she called Jim. “Hi, you've reached Jim Tucker. I'm away for two weeks on a secret mission but I'll get back to you as soon as I return.” Yarn bombing somewhere no doubt. She tried to think of who else to call. The school, of course. She did quick math, adding the six-hour time difference between
here and Italy. Four a.m. Would anyone answer the phone at four in the morning? Surely they'd been given an emergency number, she thought as she unlocked the door and stepped inside. The house was hot and stuffy. Ava opened the windows near her desk where all the papers for Maggie's program were filed away.

She found them immediately, grateful for Jim's organizational skills. The folder had
“Maggie, Italy”
written across it in Jim's handwriting. The familiarity of his perfect Palmer-method capital
M
with its little hook and that graceful
I
made her heart lurch. But he was away. With another woman, she reminded herself. Ava shuffled through the papers that they had all looked at so enthusiastically just a year ago. The brochure with photographs of students standing happily in front of Renaissance buildings and fountains. The list of items to pack, each carefully checked off by Jim. The welcome letter, the list of fellow students. How relieved Ava had felt as they'd planned all of this. Sending Maggie to this program had been a sign that she had finally—finally!—settled down. The drugs and the drinking, the sex, the reckless behavior, all of it was behind her at last.

Except it wasn't. She'd gone missing and Ava knew that with Maggie that could mean anything. How had she been so naive as to believe that Maggie was really all right?

Slowly she dialed the emergency number. The phone rang right away, and Ava sank into the seat at the desk, waiting.

It seemed to take forever, but at last a woman answered in a weary voice. “Betty Lewis.”

“I'm so sorry to bother you,” Ava said, “but I received a frightening call from a man who told me my daughter was missing. Maggie? Maggie Tucker?”

“What man?” Betty Lewis asked.

“I . . . I don't know,” Ava admitted. “He was French.”

“A French man called you—”

“On Maggie's phone!” Ava said. “He had her phone!” The facts suddenly hit her hard. Why did a French man have Maggie's phone? Why did he know she was missing? Why hadn't he left his name?

“A French man called you from your daughter's phone,” Betty Lewis repeated.

“Yes!”

“And your daughter's name is?”

Was this woman listening to anything Ava said?

“Maggie! Maggie Tucker!” Ava said.

“Maggie Tucker, Maggie Tucker,” Betty Lewis said under her breath, and Ava could imagine her going through some files of her own.

“She's in the art history program,” Ava offered, as if that might move things along.

“Mrs. Tucker?” Betty Lewis said. “Your daughter dropped out of the program in January.”

“That's impossible,” Ava said, even though somewhere deep inside her she knew that with Maggie nothing was impossible. “It's a common name. Tucker. This is
Maggie
Tucker.”

“Right. Maggie Tucker. Mother Ava? Is that you?”

Betty Lewis didn't wait for Ava to answer.

“She withdrew in January, moved out of the dormitory, and as far as I know no one here has heard from her since.”

A deep coldness filled Ava.
No one here has heard from her since
. A slideshow of those blurry, distant pictures played through Ava's mind. All the faceless girls on the Ponte Vecchio and in front of the Uffizi. Those pictures were stock photos taken from
the Internet, she realized, and posted as if Maggie had taken them herself.

Betty Lewis was talking about calling the American embassy. “Do you want the number?” she asked.

But the number was right there on the contact sheet. Now Ava sighed. “No, I have it.”

“In the morning I can ask her roommate if Maggie said anything before she left,” Betty Lewis said.

“What's her roommate's name?” Ava asked. She would call the girl herself. Now.

“I'm afraid I can't tell you that,” Betty Lewis said. “I have to protect my students.”

“Well you didn't protect my daughter! You let her wander off alone!”

The woman hesitated. “But you signed the withdrawal form. I'm looking at it right now.”

Of course, Ava thought. Maggie had learned to forge Ava's name a long time ago.

“I'll talk to the girl,” Betty Lewis said.

“That would be helpful. Thanks.”

Ava gave Betty Lewis her cell phone number, and then hung up.

Ava stared down at the happy smiling students on the brochure.
Now what?

A
fter she called the embassy, Ava emailed Will.

Hey there? Have you heard from your sister lately? Kind of important . . .

She emailed Jim.

Dear Jim, Call me immediately. Apparently Maggie withdrew from the program in January and no one knows where she is.

She emailed Maggie.

Maggie, someone has your phone and called me and said you were missing. I'm a little out of my mind with worry. CALL! Please!

Then she sat staring at her phone as if she could make a response from any of them appear just by her sheer will and desperation. She tried not to think of where Maggie might have gone. Of what might have happened to her. Once, when Maggie was fifteen and just back from a wilderness treatment program in Utah, she went missing. Ava and Jim had driven around Providence, looking in all the places where kids went to buy drugs, getting out of the car to show Maggie's picture to stoned teenagers in doorways on Thayer Street. Two days later she showed up back home. “I met a boy,” she said as an explanation, as if that was okay.

That's when Ava knew. Maggie had met a boy in Florence and gone off with him. But where?

She got in bed, even though she knew sleep wouldn't come. She kept her phone on the pillow beside her, the one she still thought of as Jim's pillow. From her nightstand, she picked up this month's book club selection,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
. It looked like a children's book with an old-fashioned girl sitting on a wall, a bare tree behind her.
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York
, Ava read.
Especially in the summer of 1912
. . .

By the time she heard an email drop into her inbox, Ava was lost in that summer of 1912 and that girl, Francie Nolan. Startled, she dropped the book and grabbed her phone.

Will.

Not for a while. But she told me she'd been in a bad relationship and was out of it now. I've been worried. Do you know something?

Ava considered whether to tell him the truth. What could he do from remote Uganda? But on the other hand, he was a grown-up, and sensible. Even as a little boy, Will had been full of common sense. The first line of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
came back to her. A serene boy, she thought.

As soon as Ava typed the words,
A French man called from her phone
, she realized that Maggie hadn't just left the program. She'd left Italy. And gone to France.

Shit, Will
, she typed.
I think she's somewhere in France
.

Will immediately emailed her back:
?????

She left the program in January
, Ava wrote.

Her phone rang and an unknown number flashed on the screen.

Ava answered, surprised to hear Betty Lewis on the other end apologizing for calling so late.

“Her roommate said Maggie met a boy and left for Paris with him,” Betty said. “Of course,” she added matter-of-factly, “the program has no culpability in this.”

A boy. Paris.

“Of course,” Ava said.

“I wish I had more concrete information,” Betty said before signing off.

She had to go there, Ava thought. To Paris. But how do you find a missing girl in a big city? She went downstairs to make coffee and picked up her to-do list on her notepad.
Find Rosalind Arden
, she'd written.
Go to the library? A used bookstore? Find her publisher???
Even as she wrote these ideas yesterday, the task of finding someone who seemed to have vanished completely felt impossible. Now here she was having to find Maggie.

Ava wrote her daughter's name on the top of the next page. When Maggie was young, her daughter always drew a daisy over the
i
instead of a dot. Sometimes she'd get her colored pencils and make each petal yellow, the center blue. Ava absently drew a daisy over the
i
in Maggie.The phone rang. It was Jim.

“I've called both embassies, Italy and France,” she told him after she recounted everything she knew. “I don't know what else to do.”

“Haven't you been talking to her all this time?” Jim said. Ava could hear the frustration in his voice. “Didn't you suspect she was maybe not in Florence?”

She thought about all those blurry, distant, generic pictures on Instagram. About the email explaining why she couldn't visit. Agritourism, slow food. Of course she should have suspected something.

“I need to go to Paris,” Ava said. “I need to find her.”

“Look, I'm in Helsinki. I'll fly to Paris and take pictures of Maggie with me,” Jim said. “And go to the police and the embassy. You stay put, in case she tries to call you or, I don't know, come home.”

“What if she needs me? What if—” Ava said.

“Sweetheart,” Jim said. “One of us needs to stay by the phone.”