Just One Day (24 page)

Thirty-three

T
he next day, I accept Kelly’s invitation to join the Oz crew. Today they’re going
to brave the Louvre. Tomorrow they’re going to Versailles. The day after that, they’re
taking the train to Nice. I’m invited to come with them for all of it. I have ten
days left on my ticket, and it feels like I’ve found as much as I’m going to find.
I found out that he left me a note. Which is almost more than I could’ve hoped for.
I am considering going with them to Nice. And, after my wonderful day yesterday, I’m
also considering going off on my own somewhere.

After breakfast, we all get onto the Metro toward the Louvre. Nico and Shazzer are
showing off some of their new clothes, which they got from a street market, and Kelly
is making fun of them for coming to Paris to buy clothes made in China. “At least
I got something local.” She thrusts out her wrist to show off her new high-tech digital
French- manufactured watch. “There’s this huge store near Vend
Ô
me, all they sell is watches.”

“Why do you need a watch when you’re traveling?” Nick asks.

“How many bloody trains have we missed because someone’s phone alarm failed to go
off?”

Nick gives her that one.

“You should see this place. It’s bloody enormous. They sell watches from all over;
some of them cost a hundred thousand euros. Imagine spending that on a watch,” Kelly
goes on, but I’ve stopped listening because I’m suddenly thinking of Céline. About
what she said. About how I could get
another
watch. Another. Like she knew I lost my last one.

The Metro is pulling into a station, “I’m sorry,” I tell Kelly and the gang. “I’ve
gotta go.”

_ _ _

“Where’s my watch? And where’s Willem?”

I find Céline in the club’s office, surrounded by stacks of paperwork, wearing a thick
pair of eyeglasses that somehow makes her both more and less intimidating.

She looks up from her papers, all sleepy-eyed and, maddeningly, unsurprised.

“You said I could get
another
watch, which means you knew Willem had
my
watch,” I continue.

I expect her to deny it, to shoot me down. Instead, she gives me a dismissive little
shrug. “Why would you do that? Give him such an expensive watch after one day? It
is a little desperate, no?”

“As desperate as lying to me?”

She shrugs again, lazily taps on her computer. “I did not lie. You asked if I knew
where to find him. I do not.”

“But you didn’t tell me everything, either. You saw him, after . . . after he, he
left me.”

She does this thing, neither a nod nor a shake of the head, somewhere in between.
A perfect expression of ambiguity. A diamond-encrusted stonewall.

And at just that moment, another one of Nathaniel’s French lessons comes back to me:
“T’es toujours aussi salope?”
I ask her.

One eyebrow goes up, but her cigarette goes into the ashtray. “You speak French now?”
she asks, in French.

“Un petit peu.”
A little bit.

She shuffles the paperwork, stubs out the smoldering cigarette.
“Il faut mieux être salope que lâche,”
she says.

I have 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.

“Did he take anything from my bag? Find anything?”

“No. He only smelled. . . .” She stops, as if in pain.

“He smelled what?”

“He smelled terrible,” she says solemnly. “He took your watch. I told him to leave
it. My uncle is a jeweler, so I know it was expensive. But he refused.”

I sigh. “Where can I find him, Céline? Please. You can help me with that much.”

“
That much?
I help you with so much already,” she says, all huffy with her own indignation. “And
I don’t know where to find him. I don’t lie.” She looks hard at me. “I tell you the
truth, and that is that Willem is the kind of man who comes when he comes. And mostly,
he doesn’t.”

I wish I could tell her that she’s wrong. That with us, it was different. But if he
didn’t stay in love with Céline, what makes me think that after one day, even if he
did like me, I haven’t been completely licked clean?

“So you did not have any luck? On the Internet?” she asks.

I start to gather my things. “No.”

“Willem de Ruiter is a common name,
n’est-ce pas
?” she says. Then she does something I wouldn’t have thought her capable of. She blushes.
And that is how I know she’s looked for him too. And she didn’t find him, either.
And all at once, I wonder if I haven’t gotten Céline, if not altogether wrong, then
a little bit wrong.

I take one of my extra Paris postcards. I write my name, address, all my details on
it, and hand it to her. “If you see Willem. Or if you’re ever in Boston and need a
place to crash—or store your stuff.”

She takes the postcard and looks at it. Then she shoves it in a drawer. “Boss-tone.
I think I prefer New York,” she sniffs. I’m almost relieved that she’s sounding like
her haughty self again.

I think of Dee. He could handle Céline. “That can probably be arranged.”

When I get to the door, Céline calls out my name. I turn around. I see that she’s
taken a bite of the macaron, the round cookie now a half moon.

“I am sorry I called you a coward,” she says.

“That’s okay,” I say. “I am sometimes. But I’m trying to be braver.”

“
Bon.”
She pauses, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think she maybe almost was considering
a smile. “If you find Willem again, you will need to be brave.”

_ _ _

I go sit down on the edge of a fountain to consider what Céline said. I can’t quite
make out if it was meant in support or warning, or maybe both. But it all seems academic,
anyhow, because I’ve reached a dead end. She doesn’t know where he is. I can try some
more Internet searching and send another letter to Guerrilla Will, but other than
that, I’m tapped.

You will need to be brave.

Maybe it’s all for the best. Maybe I end here. Tomorrow I will go to Versailles with
the Oz crew. And that feels okay. I pull out the map Dee and Sandra gave me to plot
my route back to the hostel. It’s not too far. I can walk. I trace the route with
my finger. When I do, my finger runs over not one but two big pink squares. The big
pink squares on this map are hospitals. I pull the map closer to my face. There are
pink squares all over the place. Paris is crazy with hospitals. I run my finger to
the art squat. There are several hospitals within a thumb’s width of the squat too.

If Willem got hurt near the art squat, and he got stitches, there’s a good chance
it happened at one of these hospitals. “Thank you, Dee!” I call out into the Paris
afternoon. “And thank you, Céline,” I add a bit more quietly. And then I get up and
go.

_ _ _

The next day, Kelly greets me coolly, which I can tell is hard work for her. I apologize
for going MIA yesterday.

“S’okay,” she says, “but you’re coming with us today to Versailles?”

I grimace. “I can’t.”

Her face hardens into hurt. “If you don’t want to hang with us, it’s fine, but don’t
make plans to spare our feelings.”

I’m not sure why I haven’t told her. It feels sort of silly, being over here, going
to all this trouble, for a guy I knew for a day. But as I tell Kelly a short version
of the long story, including today’s mad quest, her face grows serious. When I’m done,
she just gives a little nod of her head. “I understand,” she says solemnly. “I’ll
see you down at brekkie.”

When I get down to the breakfast room, Kelly and the group are huddled around one
of the big wooden tables, maps spread out in front of them. I take my croissant and
tea and yogurt and join them.

“We’re coming with you,” she declares. “All of us.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you need an army for this.” The rest of the group sloppy salute me, and then
they all start talking at once. Very loudly. People look over at us, but these guys
are irrepressible. Only the pale petite girl at the edge of our table ignores us,
keeping her nose in a book.

“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.