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It’s now three o’clock. The day is half gone, and I can see the group is antsy, tired, hungry, wishing that they’d gone to Versailles. And now that I think about it, I realize how ridiculous this is. The front desk at my father’s practice is manned by a nurse named Leona, who won’t let even me go back into the office unless my father is in there and waiting for me. Leona would never give out a record to me—her boss’s daughter, who speaks the same language as she does—let alone a foreign stranger.
“That was a bust,” I tell them when we come out onto the pavement. The cloud layer that has been sitting over Paris for the last few days has burned off while we were waiting inside, and the day has turned hot and clear. “At least you can salvage the rest of the afternoon. Get some food and have a picnic in the Luxembourg Gardens.”
I can see the idea is tempting. No one rebuffs it. “But we promised we’d be your wingmen,” Kelly says. “We can’t let you do this alone.”
e no idea what she said. I do my best to keep a straight face as I try to find keywords to unlock the sentence like Madame taught us, salope, bitch; mieux, better. Lâche. Milk? No, that’s lait. But then I remember Madame’s refrain about venturing into the unknown being an act of bravery and her teaching us, as always, the opposite of courageux: lâche.
Did Céline just call me a coward? I feel the indignation travel from the back of my neck up to my ears to the top of my head. “You can’t call me that,” I sputter in English. “You don’t get to call me that. You don’t even know me!”
“I know enough,” she replies in English. “I know that you forfeited.” Forfeit. I see myself waving a white flag.
“Forfeit? How did I forfeit?”
“You ran away.”
“What did the note say?” I am practically screaming now.
But the more excited I become, the more aloof she becomes. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“But you know something.”
She lights another cigarette and blows smoke on me. I wave it away. “Please, Céline, for a whole year, I’ve assumed the worst, and now I’m wondering if I assumed the wrong worst.”
More silence. Then “He had the, how do you say it, sue-tours.”
“Sue-tours?”
“Like with sewing on skin.” She points to her cheek.
“Sutures? Stitches? He had stitches?”
“Yes, and his face was very swollen, and his eye black.”
“What happened?”
“He would not tell me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”
“You did not ask me this yesterday.”
I want to be furious with her. Not just for this, but for being such a bitch that first day in Paris, for accusing me of cowardice. But I finally get that none of this is about Céline; it never was. I’m the one who told Willem I was in love with him. I’m the one who said that I’d take care of him. I’m the one who bailed.
I look up at Céline, who is watching me with the cagey expression of a cat eyeing a sleeping dog. “Je suis désolée,” I apologize. And then I pull the macaron out of my bag and give it to her. It’s raspberry, and I was saving it as a reward for confronting Céline. It is cheating Babs’s rule to give it to someone else, but somehow, I feel she’d approve.
She eyes it suspiciously, then takes it, pinching it between her fingers as though it were contagious. She gingerly lays it on a stack of CD cases.
“So, what happened?” I ask. “He came back here all banged up?”
She nods, barely.
“Why?”
She frowns. “He would not say.”
Silence. She looks down, then quickly glances at me. “He looked through your suitcase.”
What was in there? A packing list. Clothes. Souvenirs. Unwritten postcards. My luggage tag? No, that snapped off in the Tube station back in London. My diary? Which I now have. I grab it out of my bag, leaf through a few entries. There’s something about Rome and feral cats. Vienna and the Schönbrunn Palace. The opera in Prague. But there is nothing, nothing of me. Not my name. My address. My email address. Not the addresses of any of the people I met on the tour. We didn’t even bother with the pretense of keeping in touch. I shove the diary back in my bag. Céline is peering through narrowed eyes, watching while pretending not to.
