A Million Miles Away (15 page)

She screamed, high and fast, and put a hand over her open mouth. She could hear Peter’s laughter, and clicked back over to his image on the screen.

“We were given a three-day leave. Sam and another buddy and me are going to Paris. And you are, too. So, there it is.”

Kelsey removed her hand from her mouth, and tried to keep her panic from showing. “How could you afford this?”

“U.S. military flies free on air force planes if we ride up top, with the cargo. Your ticket wasn’t so bad, trust me. I had some money saved up.”

“Peter, this is amazing, but I have school. My parents won’t let me. I don’t know where my passport is. I…”

Kelsey was shooting off excuses, all except for the most important one: It hadn’t been her dream to go to Paris, it had been Michelle’s. Michelle spoke French. Michelle loved art museums. Michelle sang Edith Piaf (out of tune, of course) in the shower.

“It’s only for a weekend,” Peter said hopefully. Disappointment was beginning to edge in on his open face, but he didn’t give up. “Come on,” he said quietly.

Kelsey’s heart was breaking. She had to look away, to think. Because Michelle’s ghost was back again, her outline and coconut smell, made of memories she’d never have, egging her on from the empty side of the porch.
Come on
, she heard Michelle’s voice echo in her head.
For me.

Then she looked back at Peter, who was not pressuring her, just sitting in his pajamas with that faraway look in his blue eyes. “Please,” he said, his smile returning as if he already knew her answer.

“Yes,” Kelsey said, and the wind picked up, tossing her Art History notecards into a flock of white squares in the air, like a sign from something invisible, though she wasn’t sure if it was good or bad.

“Yes!” Peter shouted. He stood up and shouted, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Kelsey laughed at his antics and stood to catch the notecards, which were now scattered all over the porch. “Hang on!” she called to him.

“I’m going to bed before you change your mind,” she heard him say from the computer. “Good night.” The call dropped.

Kelsey had a lot to do.

Midnight rolled around, and Kelsey took her place at her parents’ door. She would tell them she wanted to go on a Prospective Student weekend at KU, where she would have to stay overnight in the dorms. She would ask them at their most vulnerable and sleepy, so they wouldn’t ask too many questions. She cleared her throat, so her voice would be soft and unassuming. She was wearing her old bunny slippers. It was all a part of the plan.

“Mom? Dad?” She cracked open the door.

Startled snorts from her father, and a quiet “What?” from her mother.

“Can I come in?”

Five minutes later, it was done, and her parents had gone back to sleep. Kelsey lay in her bed, her mind racing. Michelle’s passport, which she’d have to use to match the name on Peter’s ticket, was still in her desk drawer. She had Googled the details—the passport wouldn’t have been canceled unless her family sent in a request. And as far as Kelsey knew, they hadn’t. Even if she were to get questioned at the airport, she would cry and say she had taken it by accident. She would pack dark colors and high-heeled boots. She would let her eyebrows grow out. She could be Michelle—for a little while. For long enough to get there, then do the thing she was dreading. The only thing left to do was waiting for her in Paris, and though the time had finally come, the thought of it made her stomach feel like a nest of coiling snakes.

There, in person, she would tell Peter the truth.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The plane hummed to a crescendo and air began to close on Kelsey’s ears. She watched the cement meadow of Kansas City International speed past her, and wiggled her toes in her boots. They were cleared for takeoff. As the ground fell, her stomach dropped with it. She clutched the armrests tight and let her neck unhook, her head lolling on the hard cushion, hoping to sleep. She wanted time to pass quickly.

“Are you going all the way to Paris, or will you stop in Toronto?” the man next to her asked.

He had a French accent behind the veil of his breath. Kelsey had forgotten the way air could get trapped in airplanes. She hadn’t been on a flight since the Maxfield family trip to Costa Rica. Michelle had hated flying, and she hated sitting next to Kelsey. Every word out of her chatty mouth, her sister told her as she had put enormous headphones over her ears, was a new blanket of carbon.

“Paris,” she answered the man politely, and turned back to the shrinking scenery, grateful that Peter had booked her a window seat.

Now that they were gaining altitude, the pilot’s voice came on the speaker.

“Anywhere else in France?” the man asked, over the announcement, and she turned again. His eyelids drooped over black eyes and, below those, dark crescents in his skin. He had been handsome once.

“No,” she said, short.

“Why do you come to Paris?”

“To visit,” she replied.

“A boyfriend?”

Kelsey smiled, closemouthed, and said nothing. She tried to hide her face.

“It is a boyfriend, I can tell.”

“‘Allo, passengers, this is your captain speaking. My name is Rhett du Pont, and your cocaptain is Nisse Greenberg. Sunny skies over the Midwest. We are expecting a clear flight all the way from Kansas City to Toronto, and from there we should land in Paris on schedule at about noon.”

As the pilot went on, the woman in the aisle seat leaned over and gave Kelsey a wry smile, her face framed in auburn waves.

“He gets loopy on Dramamine,” she said. “But he can’t fly without it.”

“My dad has to take that, too,” Kelsey said, thinking of her giant father splayed into the aisle, fast asleep, while Kelsey, Michelle, and her mother giggled at his snoring.

“But I am right,” the man said, waving his hand. “She is thinking of a young man when she looks out the window.”

“Sorry,” the woman muttered again. “He’s not usually like this. He typically just mutters to himself about the crossword puzzle.”

“Of course I don’t do this often! This is a special case. You must tell us about him.”

Kelsey picked at the magazines in front of her, wondering how she could ever explain.
He isn’t not my boyfriend, but I do care about him.
She thought of how Peter had sent her a recording of himself saying something in French before she left, stumbling over the words as he read them from a dictionary, thinking she could understand them. But it hadn’t really been meant for her.

“There’s nothing to tell.” Kelsey shrugged.

The man stage-whispered as he gestured toward the auburn-haired woman. “My wife claims she is not romantic. She pretends she is just a practical Midwestern American woman like you. But she knows, too.”

The woman rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

“Knows what?” Kelsey said, glancing at both of them.

“You’re in love.”

“No.” She snorted. “No. I’m just…” She felt her eyes drift. In love. She tried to shrug it off, but for some reason, all she could think of was Peter on-screen, strumming a chord. “I’m just seeing a friend.”

“You’ve got quite a smile on your face for someone who is just a friend.”

“Leave her alone, sweetheart,” the woman said.

“It will happen in Paris,” she heard the man saying to his wife. “She will have to kiss her friend in Paris, yes?” Kelsey closed her eyes, pretending not to hear.

“She’s trying to rest,” the woman said lightly. “Let her be.”

When she awoke, the couple was fast asleep. She will have to kiss her friend in Paris! She ran her finger over her mouth, and tried to picture Peter’s against it. It could happen, couldn’t it? They would probably be quite bad at it, considering they had never kissed before. Considering Peter was expecting someone who wasn’t her.

She wouldn’t let him, of course. She would pull him aside and do what she had set out to do. But as she put a movie on the in-flight screen to pass the time, Kelsey noticed, for some reason, she had goose bumps.

Kelsey wandered in a daze through customs at Charles de Gaulle, her mind still at rest, replaying snatches of dialogue from one of the movies she slept to as she crossed the Atlantic.
You are, and always have been, my dream.

Soon she was rolling her suitcase through a linoleum tunnel, a new stamp on Michelle’s passport, to the smell of bleach and the buzz of overhead lights.

The tunnel opened into the international arrival gates, and Kelsey gasped. The giant, endless archway looked like the main hall of a castle, each groove composed of infinite windows, dropping fifty feet from ceiling to floor into miles of red carpet. Thousands of people pulling suitcases streamed backward and forward, passing shops she knew but now seemed different, as she caught French and Italian and German requests for Starbucks and sandwiches.

“Michelle!” she heard a man’s voice cry out, and Kelsey closed her eyes tight. This was Paris. There could be many Michelles here.

“Michelle!” she heard again, close, and she turned around.

Peter, taller than she remembered, jogged from the center of it all. He wore a tan army-issued T-shirt and fatigue pants. Before she could get out the calm, honest “hello” that she had practiced, he was hugging her so tight her feet left the ground, and he spun her around, her face in the clean scent of the crook of his shoulder, and then, without ceremony, he set her down and kissed her.

He tasted like salt and then nothing; there was only the feeling of his lips on hers. Kelsey couldn’t help but start to smile. When he let go, she was speechless, too aware of everything around her to say anything, let alone a rehearsed speech.

“It’s so good to see you,” Peter said, his blue eyes now hitting her harder than they ever could through a screen.

“You, too,” Kelsey replied.

“What is ‘welcome’ in French?” Peter asked her.

“It’s—” Kelsey started, breathless, pretending to fiddle with her suitcase as they walked.
“Bienvenue,”
she said, grateful that she had remembered the pilot’s words.

“Bienvenue,”
he said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Kelsey should have pulled away, but now it was too late. And she was in shock, listening to him talk about their plans for the evening as they strolled through the busy airport. She tried to remove the taste of him from her lips by licking them, but, of course, it just intensified.

Her body seemed to be vibrating with every beat of her heart.

Two more men in fatigues, canvas bags on their backs, greeted them at the entrance to the train into the city. She would have to break the news later, at the hotel. Now wasn’t the time.

“You found her, I see,” the shorter redhead said, and held out his hand. “Remember me?”

“Rooster?” Kelsey asked.

“Sam, if you don’t mind, ma’am,” he said, revealing freckles as he got closer.

“No, he likes Rooster better, trust me,” said his companion, a lanky, bespectacled guy with caramel-colored skin.

“I do not,” Sam said matter-of-factly.

The other guy rolled his eyes. “I’m Phil.”

“Hello, Phil,” Kelsey said, shaking hands all around.

She took a deep breath as they descended into the metro, and remembered what her parents had told her before she left for the airport, pleased that she was trying to move forward from her grief. Just try to have fun, they had said. They may have been mistaken about where she would be having fun, but Kelsey took it to heart, anyway. She had to.

She gave her biggest Midwestern smile to the severe-looking women in high heels and the old ladies with dark lipstick and the men with sculpted, curly hair who stared at the four Americans as they rode through the underbelly of the city.

She soaked in the yellowed brick and gilded block letters of each platform, just like in the movies, trying to identify the artwork on the rows of posters.

Even the advertisements are beautiful
, she found herself telling Michelle in her mind.

That one is Edgar Degas
, she thought, looking at the rough sketch of a woman stepping out of a tub on an ad for a museum called Musée d’Orsay. Next to it, women from a hundred years ago, lifting their dark skirts to reveal petticoats and calves. Next to that, the iconic tulle brushstrokes, her favorite of his before she even knew who he was:
The Pink Dancers, Before the Ballet
.

Peter leaned close to Kelsey, pointing at their stop on a map, and she could feel her skin getting hot under her sweater, from all the excitement, from the pressure of what she had to tell him, or maybe just from having him around, a pair of arms and eyes and boots to go with the face she had grown to know.

They emerged onto the Place de Clichy, at the edge of what Kelsey could only call a roundabout. Motorcycles, old-fashioned taxis, and tiny cars wound around a cement circle to their various branching roads and, in the center of it, a giant copper sculpture.