Paris Was the Place (32 page)

He turns the water on in the bathtub afterward. I get in first. He climbs in behind me, and we lie in the dark. I imagine telling him the truth. I say the sentences in my mind. But if I tell him, then he’ll make me call Sophie and confess. Then the police will question me, and I’ll ruin things for Gita. So I say nothing.

We get into bed, and I hold his hand until he falls asleep. Then I stare at the place where the ceiling meets the wall and wait. I’m with Macon and also far away from him and what I can’t understand is how it happened this way—that Gita’s gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. And Macon will never love me again. The call comes at ten-thirty. I run and grab the phone in the kitchen. Then I pull the cord until I’m under the dining table and lie down there. Sophie sounds frantic. It’s a voice I haven’t heard before, wavering and breathy. “So when was the last time you saw Gita, exactly? She is really missing, Willie. The girl is missing, and we have a problem now.”

“I know that, Sophie. That’s why I called you. I went into the market on Rue de Tournon, like I always do to get our lunch. When I came out, she’d disappeared.” Everything I say into the phone is a little bit of the truth. I almost convince myself that I’m telling the whole truth by parceling out these half-truths. But I don’t think Sophie’s really listening. She’s onto me.

“So she disappeared at lunch.”

“Before lunch. While I was getting lunch. She walked away.”

“Lord help you if you have aided that child in her escape. You will take all of us down with you! She was in your custody. I put her in your care. She is fifteen years old, Willie!” Sophie’s screaming now.

“She came to school with me, Sophie, like she always does on Tuesdays. Then we walked toward Luxembourg for lunch. On the way I went into the store and bought apples and cheese. I told her to wait outside under the awning, away from the hot sun. It was the last time I saw her.”

“You did not call anyone? You did not report this right away? You are responsible for her! They can shut us down over something like this! These are hard times in France, Willie. People are looking for any reason they can find to make all of our girls go home. She was scheduled for deportation. It is the law! What in the good Lord’s name have you done?”

“I called you as soon as I got home. I’ve never used the pay phones here.” This is weak. Very weak. I had enough franc coins. I close my eyes and bite my lip.

“The police will be here in the morning and I will be here and you will be here and, dear God, let’s hope Gita will be here.”

I stand up and put the phone back on the wall in the kitchen. Then I lie down on the edge of the rug again so that my head’s partly under the dining table. I bite my nails to the fingers, something I haven’t done since I was ten and my father covered each of my fingertips in Band-Aids and told me I couldn’t take them off. I’m there for maybe six hours. When Macon finds me, the light outside is just starting to turn. He sits on the rug by my head and scoops some of my hair up in his hands. “What are you doing down here? What’s wrong?”

“I only did what she asked me to do.”

“Who asked you to do what?”

“I haven’t hurt anyone. She has a plan with Kirkit, the cook from the center. I think they were meeting at an apartment near Orly. I tried not to know too much. Then they were taking the train to Dijon and farther south.”

“Oh, Jesus. What girl?”

“Gita.”

I watch the shock move its way across his face. First his kind eyes grow hard and narrow. Then his mouth sets in a thin line. I’ve gone over it all night under the table—how Gita chose me, but how I also chose her. She and I understand each other. We fit. This doesn’t happen very often in a life. I’ve deceived him. And “deceit” is another word for lying. So I’ve lied. “You didn’t,” he says.

“I did.” I stare at him so he’ll believe me.

“I don’t want to hear a word.” He lands on the syllables one at a time. His French accent makes them sound even more dramatic. “You are com-pli-cit. You have bro-ken the law.” His words speed up and he begins to yell: “Because she was in your custody! The more I know, the more the police will implicate me!” He stands. “Willie, they could re-voke my li-cense to prac-tice law if they find out that I live here with you and they think we col-luded!”

“But you wanted to free her just like I did.”

“By following the law, Willie!” Now he’s furious. I’ve never heard his voice like this. “She ne-ver had a good case!
Merde!
” It’s the first time I’ve seen his face contort. “You don’t listen! I never said it would work! I never said that just because her family was a danger to her that she would be allowed to stay in France! She’s a minor! She’s fifteen. What are you thinking in that head of yours? We’ve landed so few asylums into foster care! You weren’t supposed to go outside the system!” He keeps leaning toward me and then stepping back and pulling his hand compulsively through his hair. “Just because you taught her doesn’t mean this was going to have a happy ending! The system is much bigger than that!”

“I just thought …” I say. What had I thought? I’m being honest. It seemed like the good thing to do. But I needed to have bigger thinking. I needed to be able to look ahead and I couldn’t, and it’s my failing. Gita is too young to know what the right thing to do was. “I thought she needed help. I thought I understood her.”

“She wanted to leave the asylum center!” He’s raving mad now. He won’t stop yelling. It’s like all his exhaustion—all his frustration
at his job and at the legal system—is coming out at me. “But if she leaves, don’t you see that it makes it harder for all the other girls to stay!”

“I owed it to her. I felt like I set her up for asylum and it wasn’t coming.”

“You don’t get to please the people you want to please.” His voice gets quiet. He’s almost whispering, but it’s more like hissing. “You don’t get an award for running a workshop, or for understanding the girl. It goes with the job, Willie. Even when you’re in the right. Even when you’re doing work that is on the side of good. There is nothing that says you can break the law for one girl.” Then he’s loud again and getting louder: “Every girl is special, Willie. In this country, you just have to do the work and trust the mechanisms!”

“Now you’re the one lying. Because all this time you’ve been talking about your challenges to the court and your challenges to the damn system, but when the moment comes you give in.” I don’t know him anymore. He’s just a man I met in the hall of an asylum center five months ago—a lawyer who’s sticking to the law in the most predictable ways. I’m too tired.

I sit up and put my face close to his. “You don’t understand this because you’re a man.” I don’t believe my words as soon as I say them, but they’re my only line of defense left. It’s still dark in the apartment, but the sky has gone from black to gray to the palest pink, and cars are starting to move on the street. “I could help her, and so I did. She asked me. She was like a daughter to me.”

“She was your student, Willie! She was never your daughter!” His yelling has a bitterness. Has he been waiting to hurl these things at me? “There is a code of ethics. This is my profession, for God’s sake! This is what I’ve staked everything on, and we’re not in high school here, picking favorites and taking them on field trips!”

“I kept you out of it on purpose. Nothing bad will happen to you.” Look at how worried he is about himself. “I think Gita has a shot at a better life in France and that I’ll get to see her. Not anytime soon, but maybe in a year or more she’ll surface.”

Quiet again. He’s almost subdued. He seems tired and resigned
when he walks toward the bedroom. I’m waiting for it to be over. It’s been worse in some ways than I’d thought it would be. But then, I hadn’t really thought. He will have to forgive me. I don’t know when. But slowly I will convince him to love me again. Right now I fight.

“You are out of your mind.” He stops and throws his arms into the air once. “I wish I’d learned this much earlier about you. You create these fantasies. None of this is ever going to happen. All you can hope is that she doesn’t end up dead. You didn’t give her money, did you?” He’s getting worked up again. His voice rises. “Tell me you didn’t? That’s a worse offense. They’ll get you for it if you gave her money!”

I pretend I haven’t heard his question. “So you don’t get to stay here unless you have a war on your side? Or famine or religious persecution? She has a sister in France and a sweet-faced brother and a mother. She has nothing in Jaipur except an arranged marriage. Maybe she’ll make contact with her family here again—not right away but soon enough. Maybe she and her mother and Pradeep can find a way to live together in France.”

“You have been secretly planning this!” Macon yells.

“Not really. That is the weirdest part of this. I only decided at the last minute.” I have no empathy for him, and it’s such an unsettling sensation. To be that removed from him. All my feeling has transferred to Gita.

“We can save more girls if we follow the law, Willie. This is what you don’t understand. It’s my job!” He keeps yelling from the bedroom. “To follow the law! It does not mean I agree with the law or admire the law. But at least the court lets the girls speak. The girls see that there is a system. They see that their lives are not dictated by fate. This can be empowering. Just to know there are laws!”

“Try,” I yell back, “telling that to Gita. Please, Macon. What part of Gita’s hearing do you think was empowering for her?”

“They decided to have her fly safely back to her grandmother! Now she is a homeless teenager on the run in France! Jesus Christ! If the state censures me, then the other kids I represent in court will have
no one, don’t you see? One breach like yours and our little, wobbly system topples.” He grabs his things and puts them in his backpack. It takes him only about four minutes to gather what he needs, which is about the amount of time I’ve always thought it would take him to leave me.

I get dressed slowly after that. I’m not stalling; it’s that my body’s coursing with dread. This is Paris in the summer—windows open to the street and brown sparrows busy in the tops of the green elm trees. The wind blows the curtains out into the room and retracts them, so the pale linen presses flat against the glass. The apartment building across the street looks like a smaller ocean tanker. There are yellow awnings on the windows of the highest floor, and the front is like a rounded bow that wraps the street corner. Every morning I’ve woken up here this architecture has pleased me deep in my bones. Every morning until now it’s inspired me.

I put on my jeans and a black T-shirt and pull my cowboy boots on by the door. Gita’s out there somewhere in France with a boy she’s known for only a few months from the kitchen at the asylum center. I take the elevator and flag a taxi outside the front door. It’s still early—just after six-thirty. The flower markets that block the narrow streets along Boulevard St. Germain have been going for hours, and so has the fish market near Pont St. Michel. Maybe Gita got scared and came back to her bed on Rue de Metz last night. Maybe she’s lying there now and we can forget this ever happened?

The taxi driver smokes a filterless cigarette that reeks. He says he’s from Lebanon and talks to me in speed French about the abuses
of Mitterrand. How the French president doesn’t create enough new jobs for immigrants. How he himself sends money home to his wife and children in Beirut, but it’s not enough. So why is he here? he asks. Away from the children he loves?

I feel too far apart from my brother. In the two days since I last talked to him, everything’s changed. I’ve got to call him. There’s no traffic on the streets, and the cab is outside the front door to the asylum center in ten minutes. Truffaut buzzes me in and motions me to his office with a flick of his finger. The room feels just like what it is: an almost empty old principal’s office with a metal desk. The green poster of the metro system seems like a cruel joke to me now. How many of the girls in here ever get to ride the metro?

“You will stay,” Truffaut says in his strong French accent. “We are waiting for the officials from OFPRA and the police and Sophie.” He brings folding metal chairs from a closet next to his desk.

The OFPRA men arrive first, dressed in black jeans. The policemen are municipal, and come in full blue uniform. One has a shaved head and a brown goatee; the other has a crew cut like Truffaut’s. Sophie’s last, in a long, black caftan, which only adds to her gravity. Everyone speaks French. Truffaut is able to smoke two cigarettes in a row, mashing them in an ashtray in the shape of a soccer ball on his desk. The policemen write down what I say about Gita’s face (round) and her hair (black) and her sari (green) and her sneakers (black). “We will all be looking for her,” the one with the shaved head says. “Looking for a short, big-eyed Indian girl in a green sari.”

Good luck, I want to say. Good luck with that. Everything heightens inside Truffaut’s office. Everything is distilled. Gita knew how to name her affections. She thought she was being loyal to her sister by not saying anything about Manju. Loyal to her mother. To her brother. And to some complicated idea she had of what family is. She was fierce in her love for Pradeep. I saw it that day in here—how much she needed him to go to school. I want to stand and walk all the way to Luke’s apartment. This is something else Gita taught me: how important it is to name our intentions.

“When did you last see her?”

“Outside the market on the corner of Rue de Tournon and Rue St. Sulpice.”

“Did she tell you she was planning to escape?”

“No.” This is a full and complete lie. I don’t look at Sophie while I say it. She sits very close, staring at my face while I talk, willing me to break and tell her the truth. Instead I see the starlings at the gas station in Aix-en-Provence in my mind—how the flock of birds pulled a black blanket across the sky. I can’t concentrate on what the police are saying. Macon gave me kisses on my face in the truck. Kisses on my neck. Where is he today?

“Did she tell you her final destination?” one of the policemen asks.