Paris by the Book: One of the most enchanting and uplifting books of 2018

“Let’s get you home,” I said.

I know I need to find a way to say why I loved him still, even how I loved him. I know it’s not enough to point to two children’s books in a bar—or two daughters in a drafty house and almost twenty years and seventy-four birthday cakes and 150-odd doctors’ appointments, eight zoo field trips, ten million sports practices, one chess tournament, one violin and two retainers gone missing, one thousand times our children were told you have the coolest dad ever and one strange, delightful evening at Carnegie Hall onstage with Daphne’s entire second-grade class, who, under his tutelage, had won a national poetry-writing award, cash money, enough to adopt a blind tortoise from a turtle rescue group the class named Milton, because when Adam and Eve leave Eden in Paradise Lost—which Robert somehow read, parts of, anyway, with all those seven-year-olds—they do so “with wandering steps and slow.” And because Milton was blind. And because I loved my husband so very much I fell for a metaphor as bright and red and urgent as a stop button in an elevator.

“Help is on the way,” the intercom said.

“Don’t worry,” I hushed. He shook his head. I stood. I pushed the stop button in. The elevator lurched downward.

“It’s too late,” he said.

I brushed the hair from those eyes, and looked for him. There he was. Somewhere. And somewhere inside, something hurt. I fantasized about being able to reach down inside him, to reset some switch, turn some dial, push or pull a button that said stop. I wanted to help him that much. I loved him that much. Enough to say what I said then.

“We’ll escape!”

But we didn’t, of course.

Until he did.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_3223028c-5313-5d96-9c95-046c215fba74)

Robert disappeared from our home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, twelve weeks before my daughters and I arrived in Paris. The exact moment and means were never a mystery: very early, on foot, out the back door. His departure raised no alarm; he was a runner and liked early mornings best. And it wasn’t worth much more notice when he didn’t return for breakfast; occasionally he ran long.

When he later missed dinner, I reminded myself that he’d sometimes get consumed by a project, so much so that he’d forget to charge his phone (which he made reluctant use of regardless). After still no sign of him that night, I decided that he’d gone off on one of his “writeaways.” Ellie and Daphne asked if he’d left a note. He had not.

And then I discovered he had, a very short one. Six letters.

The first person I called when Robert disappeared was Eleanor. It’s not quite correct to call her my friend. Nor is it correct to call her Ellie’s godmother—we never had her baptized—but both insist Eleanor is. What is true is that back when I was in graduate school, I’d taken some English classes and she was the department chair. I went to her to complain about a grade I’d gotten from another professor, and over the course of an hour, she convinced me both that the grade I’d received was, if anything, too generous and that if I spoke as plainly and fearlessly on paper as I did in person, I’d never have cause to complain about a grade again. She was right, but I still knocked on her office door regularly ever after, even once I’d quit my program: I was sure she could resolve my life’s larger complaints as readily as she had my academic ones.

“Leah,” Eleanor said after one particularly long afternoon. “I’m not the chair of your life.” I smiled, and smile now at the memory. It was the only time she ever lied to me.

Not that I believed all the things she told me, such as, your parents don’t hate you. I told myself that they did, as they’d died before I’d had a chance to apologize to them for being a terrible daughter. Their deaths came within months of each other my third semester in graduate school, my father after a long illness and my mother after a short one. For the record—and as they themselves would surely protest—I wasn’t a terrible daughter. I had been bothered by them for being so old for so long, for not providing me siblings, for living in rural Wisconsin, for not having more money, and finally, for assuring me it was “just fine” if I didn’t go to college (neither of them had). So many grievances, and so minor, and yet, during their illnesses prior to their deaths, I’d fancifully expected to be in some way relieved when they departed.

I was, of course, ruined. I paid for an elaborate funeral few attended and a massive joint headstone that would have embarrassed them. That used up just about all the money they’d left me; they’d mortgaged the bar to pay for my undergrad degree at a private college, a misspent five-year experience (I’d flunked much of freshman year, including French) I thought I could justify by doubling down and attending graduate school.

Other professors resisted the in loco parentis part of the job, but for Eleanor, avowedly single, childless, ageless, it was the job. She tidied up my grad school exit; found me that campus speechwriting job; told me, when I showed her the picture of my parents’ gaudy grave (I don’t know why I did this, but I had to, I kept it behind my license in my wallet), that I was a good daughter and, when I wailed in protest, told me she was sorry we weren’t graveside right then. I asked why. She said that would allow her to break off part of the outsize stone and hit me over the head with it.

Guilt, the greediest emotion, wants everything, she said. Grief just wants time. And time is just what she gave me.

So when I called her after Robert disappeared, I wasn’t surprised she told me to sit tight for another day. But when, on the third day, I called her and said I was calling the police, I was very surprised to hear she already had.

The police had told her what they’d told me, but they told me in person, during the middle of the day, all of this invisible to the girls, safely at school: wait.

I then told the girls their father had decided to get an early start on his summer writing period, always an intensive stretch, and that he’d be home soon enough. Ellie and Daphne exchanged sidelong glances—something didn’t quite add up—but Dad was Dad. And our family was our family, which is to say, a bubble, the kind I suppose a woman who loses her parents young inflates automatically. I don’t mean I bubble-wrapped my daughters, just that my default parenting position was to forestall adulthood as long as I could. The tooth fairy still called on us faithfully to collect the odd bicuspid. Daddy would return, too.

And then it was a week without him, and then it was three, and then it was the last day of school. We were crossing the street with the help of a motorcycle cop pressed into service for the great summer exodus. He blew his whistle, stopped traffic, waved us past. Ellie stopped.

“Ellie, no,” Daphne said, a hiss, a plea.

Ellie looked at me, several steps ahead, and then replied to her sister: “Well, we know she won’t.”

The policeman pointed to the curb. “Hurry along, girls; catch up to your mom.”

“Where’s our dad?” Ellie said.

And then, tears. Daphne’s, followed by Ellie’s, the latter’s quite rare, almost as rare as a policeman abandoning traffic control after two girls go to pieces mid-crosswalk. Everything that followed seemed to take place in three minutes but in real-world time took at least as many weeks: explaining to the cop—and thus, the girls—that yes, their father was missing and yes, the police knew this; and no, the police didn’t know where he was, either.

The detective assigned to us did have a theory, however, which he shared with me when we were alone. “In my experience,” he said, “the more dead they are, the more clues you find.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “So no sign,” he said, “is not the worst sign.”

And so we didn’t make signs. No flyers, no posters, no posting online. I didn’t want to advertise our loss; to do so would somehow make it real. Daddy was simply away. He’d left no clues. I shared the detective’s theory, edited, with the girls. Inane, and yet, it steadied them. It steadied me. I sounded like an adult. I spoke to them as little adults. Robert’s disappearance had aged them, but my talking this way somehow ratified that leap.

I’m not sure I should have said anything. Everyone has to grow up sometime, yes. But like most parents, I didn’t want it to happen in an instant, outside a police station. I protected them to a degree: little grown-ups they might be or were becoming, but I still took care not to say the word alive, and I certainly didn’t say dead.

Even though he was. Had to be. Like the police, I had no evidence, except one important piece that I couldn’t share with them because they’d think I’d lost my mind. Which I had, partly, but enough remained for me to note that I didn’t feel Robert in my life anymore. I have a theory that couples are bound with some type of invisible rubber band. It expands and contracts, but it’s always there, a slight tug that you may not even notice until you notice, as I had, that it was completely gone.

What I also didn’t feel—this will sound awful, but wait—was sad. I felt scared, and angry, and alone. I could see sadness, some dark shore up ahead, but I wasn’t there yet because the truth wasn’t here yet. I felt Robert was gone; I didn’t know. And yet, amid all the advice I read about keeping the faith, keeping hope alive, I found one tough-talk website that said, your spouse might be dead. Prepare for that, too. So I did.

The funeral director who buried my parents had been ashamed at his success in overselling me—my theory, anyway, for why he gave me a pile of books, free, on death and dying and surviving, which had survived on my bookshelves ever since. With Robert three weeks gone, I went to the books and started poring over them anew. It didn’t quite make sense: Robert had not been declared dead, and as I’ve said, we resolutely avoided that word, even the concept.

But I had lost someone, hadn’t I? I had. And at least one of the books reassured me—in a chapter addressing the death of a loved one whose remains are not recovered—loss is no euphemism.

It was a start, anyway. A start into a peculiar descent into a peculiar grief. I found that, at this stage, the practical advice these books dispensed was useful: eat, exercise, sleep. I should not rush past my loss, not feel any undue burden to “move on,” but I shouldn’t linger, either. Keep moving. I did.

And I kept reading, and not surprisingly, reading about death, widowhood, survivorship, colored my thoughts—my hopes—of Robert. As weeks passed without him, these feelings gathered force, mass, became a scar.

It wasn’t right. I wasn’t right. But has there ever been a wife in the world who’s not imagined the death of her husband? Idly or urgently, depending on the situation. Mine was both. And mine was complicated still further by the fact that this was not the first time I’d wondered whether he was alive, whether he’d come back from this or that writeaway right away. I didn’t wish him ill—no, the absolute opposite. I wished him well because I hoped it would make him well, which would, in turn, make us all well. I had been losing him, Robert, and when the police asked, were there any signs he’d disappear? I lied and said no because I didn’t know how to say that he himself was the sign, that he and his words and his smile and his question marks were steadily disappearing, day by day.

I did not want Robert to have died. But I also did not know what else would explain the way I felt, which felt so similar to what I’d experienced after losing my parents: achy, antsy, haunted.

Prepare for life without him. Practice. I did. It helped. I determined I would privately pretend Robert was dead, then, until proven otherwise. And knowing I was pretending would stave off the larger, harder questions.

But what about my daughters’ questions?

Ellie and Daphne had held it together until the crosswalk and to a degree afterward, comforted that the police were on the case. But as days passed and Dad did not appear, things began happening. They acted out. Slammed doors. Fought. I asked the pediatrician for advice. This is normal, he said, which almost made me laugh, because nothing was. Still: I was to watch for “self-harm”—cutting—or eating disorders—or detailed discussions of suicide.

What I saw was none of this; the only self they were trying to harm was Mom. Suicidal thoughts? No. Homicidal, yes. Their eyes tracked me like I was prey. My jury-rigged survival approach—dead Robert as placeholder, receptacle for my grief-in-waiting—I could see that it would not work for them. Indeed, to declare him dead without producing his body—it would be as if I had killed him.

And so death stalked us, made somehow more powerful, more omnipresent, by our not discussing it. For example: one soft summer evening, walking our neighborhood’s shopping strip, salving our sorrows with ice cream, Daphne managed to smear chocolate on Ellie’s new top (its purchase an earlier salve). An accident, but Ellie screamed a soul-tearing scream. Daphne screamed a lesser scream, but in it rang the simmering anger of days upon days: at her father for disappearing, at her mother for not finding him, and especially at her sister, Ellie, for taking out all of her anger and despair and hurt on Daphne in a dozen different ways. And then Ellie smashed her cone in Daphne’s shirt.

Daphne plucked Ellie’s phone from her back pocket and threw it into the street.

At this point, the film goes silent for a full minute. Or it does when it plays in my mind. I know that, in real life, the next sixty seconds were particularly noisy, but I couldn’t hear them then. I couldn’t hear my own screaming, which eyewitnesses told me was even louder than my daughters’.

Ellie’s phone was her portal, her jet pack, her favorite toy. Something to be chased without hesitation, a ball bouncing into the street. One southbound car screeched and missed her, a northbound pickup ground her phone into the pavement. At this point, my film regained sound, just in time for me to think I was hearing Ellie’s bones crunch like kindling.

They didn’t; the pickup, after destroying the phone, had stopped just short of Ellie. Hip did meet bumper, but the driver had stopped so miraculously, precisely, shy of her that all his truck really did was tip her to the ground. She never hit her head. Someone ran up with a lawyer’s business card, insisted we go to the hospital. The paramedic said it was our choice. The driver was relieved when Ellie chose not to. I was relieved when Ellie, perhaps because she was so shaken by the experience, perhaps because she was certain I would now buy her a new and fancier phone, hugged Daphne and apologized for yelling at her. Daphne mumbled her own apology, incoherent.

We staggered home. We changed and brushed our teeth. We apologized to each other. Ellie told me what kind of new phone she wanted. Daphne said nothing, stayed bent over a diary Eleanor had given her, scribbling entries Eleanor said I shouldn’t read but which I of course did. I later woke Daphne when I saw that day’s final line:

Whoever you take next, let it be me.