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“Are you sure you guys want to miss Versailles?”
“Versailles is a relic,” Kelly insists. “It’s not going anywhere. But this is real life. Real romance. What could be more French than that?”
“We’re coming with you, like it or not. If we have to follow you to every French hospital between here and Nice,” Shazzer says.
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” I say “I’ve looked on the map. I’ve narrowed it down to three likely hospitals.”
The elfin girl looks up. Her eyes are so pale they seem to be made of water. “I’m sorry, but did you say you were going to a hospital?” she asks.
I look at the Australians, my ragtag army, all of them gung ho. “Apparently so.”
The elfin girl looks at me with a weird intensity. “I know hospitals,” she says in a quiet voice.
I look back at her. Really, I can’t think of anything more boring than this, except maybe a visit to a French unemployment office. I can’t imagine that she would want to come along. Except maybe she’s lonely. And that I understand.
“Do you, do you want to go with us?” I ask.
“Not particularly,” she says. “But I think I should.”
The first hospital on the map turns out to some sort of private hospital, where, after an hour of being sent from one office to the next, we find out that, while there is an emergency room, it does not take most cases off the street, but rather sends them to the public hospitals. They send us to Hôpital Lariboisière. We head straight for the urgences, the French version of the emergency room, and after being given a number and told to wait, we sit for ages in uncomfortable chairs, along with all the people with broken elbows and coughs that sound really ugly and contagious.
The initial enthusiasm of the group starts to flag when they realize that going to an emergency room is as boring in France as it is anywhere else. They are reduced to entertaining themselves with spitballs and card games of War, which does not endear the nurses to them. Wren, the strange, pale, pixie girl we’ve picked up, participates in none of the silliness. She just keeps reading her book.
By the time we are called to the front counter, the nurses are hating us, and the feeling is pretty much mutual. Shazzer, who apparently speaks the best French, is anointed ambassador, and I don’t know if it’s her French skills or her diplomatic ones that are lacking, but within five minutes, she is heatedly arguing with the nurse, and within ten, we are being escorted to the street.
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.”
I hold up my hands in surrender. “You’re not. I’m done. This is a lost cause.”
Maps are taken out. Metro routes are debated. Picnic items are discussed.
“People mix up their patron saints, you know?” I look up. Wren, our pixie tagalong, who has been all but silent all day, has finally spoken.
“They do?”
She nods. “Saint Anthony is the patron saint of lost things. But Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. You have to make sure you ask the right saint for help.”
There’s a moment as everyone looks at Wren. Is she some kind of religious nut?
“Who would be in charge of a lost person?” I ask.
Wren stops to consider. “That would depend. What kind of lost?”
I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s lost at all. Maybe he’s exactly where he wants to be. Maybe I’m the lost one, chasing someone who has no desire to be found. “I’m not sure.”
Wren twirls her bracelet, fingering the charms. “Perhaps you should just pray to both.” She shows me the little charms with each patron saint. There are many more charms, one with a date, another with a clover, one with a bird.
“But I’m Jewish.”
“Oh, they don’t care.” Wren looks up at me. Her eyes don’t seem blue so much as the absence of blue. Like the sky just before dawn. “You should ask the saints for help. And you should go to that third hospital.”
Hôpital Saint-Louis turns out to be a four-hundred-year-old hospital. Wren and I make our way into the modern wing that sits adjacent. I’ve sent the others on to Luxembourg Gardens without much of an argument. Sunlight filters in through the glass atrium, throwing prisms of light onto the floor.
