The Paris Key (3 page)

No reprieve was granted. At 12:13 a.m. an announcement was made: The man had been put to death. A few protestors lingered, gathering in prayer circles or making statements to the press, but most shuffled back to their cars in silence.

Angela had driven them home, her cheeks wet with tears. It was only as they were nearing the farm that Genevieve realized she didn't know what the man had done to earn his death sentence. The sad, distracted look on her mother's face kept her from asking.

She was sorry, now, that she hadn't. There were so many things she wished she had asked her mother when she had the chance.

“What had they done, the prisoners in the Bast-ee?” Genevieve asked her uncle.

“Offended the king in some way. They were political prisoners.”

“Were there a lot of them?”

“Good question!” Dave chuckled and shook his head. “Actually, turns out there were only seven prisoners in the Bastille at the time, but it was a symbolic victory. And never underestimate the power of a symbolic victory. Now, see that river, right there? That's the famous Seine.”

The river was a black expanse in the rapidly fading light. A series of small bridges lit by ornate streetlamps straddled the water, leading to yet more bleak buildings on the other side.

“And here we are, home at last,” Dave said as he turned onto a tiny street with cobblestone sidewalks.

Genevieve looked up just in time to catch sight of a small plaque on the side of a building. Craning her neck, she made out white letters against a faded blue background.

“Village Saint-Paul?” she read.

“Village Saint-Paul,” Dave repeated with the French pronunciation. “One of the oldest neighborhoods in all of Paris. Full of nooks and crannies, little lanes and courtyards with no cars allowed, just the occasional bicycle. We're known as the antiques district, people come from all over to shop, and we have a few big outdoor antique fairs every year.”

“Oh.”

Dave looked at her with amusement. “You don't like antiques?”

She shrugged.

“I'll tell you a secret,” he said in a whisper. “I don't care much about them, either. Not antiques per se, anyway. But I do love antique keys and the old houses they belong to.”

Dave stopped the car in the middle of the street, killed the engine, and got out, circling around to get her suitcase and bag out of the trunk. Genevieve followed suit. It made her nervous that they were blocking the way, but there weren't any other cars on this narrow side street. In fact, there seemed to be no life at all.

“This is it,” he said proudly, gesturing toward a storefront. The lights in the shop were out, so all she saw was a display window in the anemic glow of a streetlamp that barely cut through the cool mist of the evening. A wooden sign over the window read
: UNDER LOCK AND KEY.

“It's in English.” The one thing Genevieve had been prepared for upon her arrival in France was not to be able to understand anything.

“Yep, I keep meaning to come up with a better French name but never quite got around to it.”

“Do people here speak English?”

Dave chuckled. “Not so's you'd notice. The younger folks more than the older ones. But I went with the English saying because the French word for locks,
serrures
, was hard for an old country boy like me to pronounce. And besides, after the war Americans were pretty popular around here.”

Genevieve tried to remember why. She knew the U.S. had been involved in World War II, but she was fuzzy on the details. The Gulf War, Vietnam, Korea, the world wars . . . the dates and details bobbed aimlessly in her head, sticking around only long enough to carry her through whatever test she was taking. Ancient history.

“We helped liberate France from the Nazis,” Dave explained. “Now, can you carry this heavy bag all by yourself?”

She nodded, grabbing her suitcase and hoisting it as best she could. The little wheels on the bag wouldn't roll on the uneven stones. Dave limped as he led the way into the alcove.
Maybe everyone had scars by the time they grew old,
Genevieve thought.

He unlocked the little shop and waved her through the door.

The locksmith shop was petite, more like a large walk-in closet than a proper store. Its dusty shelves were jammed with locks and keys, doorknobs and doorknockers, decorative hinges and shutter hardware. Small wooden barrels held bolts and screws and other metal tools. It smelled of pipe tobacco and some sort of oil, like a car mechanic's garage.

One wall was festooned with clocks: cuckoo clocks, painted clocks, clocks with no numbers, clocks in the shape of the sun. Their frenetic ticking filled the otherwise silent space.

“Let me introduce you to your
tante
Pasquale—that's ‘aunt Pasquale' in French—and to your cousin Catharine, and then I'll run and park the car. Let me tell you, Genevieve, parking in Paris is not for the faint of heart. But your old uncle Dave has a few tricks up his sleeve.”

He gave her a wink and opened a small door behind the old-fashioned brass cash register.

“Bienvenue chez nous,”
he said. “Welcome home.”

M
ary insisted on taking Genevieve to the airport, located many miles to the south of San Francisco, in the city of Burlingame.

“Those bags are too heavy to schlep on BART,” Mary said. “Besides, I feel like Paris will swallow you up and I'll never see you again.”

“That's not true. And anyway, it's only a flight away. You should come visit.”

“Maybe,” she answered with a shrug. Mary was nervous about driving on the bridge, so she kept her eyes fixed on the span, her hands wrapped so tightly around the wheel, her knuckles were white. Still, when Genevieve offered to drive, she declined, citing the need to practice.

This had always intrigued Genevieve: Mary was fearless about so much of life, but occasionally some small thing, some everyday function—like signing up for health insurance or driving on the bridge—threw her for a loop.

Mary was an artist. Like Genevieve, she had been on her own from a very young age. Probably that was why they'd gravitated to each other in the crowded coffeehouse where they'd met; Mary asked to share the table, and after trading a few snarky comments about the oddly bewhiskered hipsters surrounding them, they recognized kindred souls. Unlike Genevieve, however, Mary had a straightforward way of saying what she needed and wanted and thought, without subterfuge.

The airport was a series of long lines and overly personal security inspections, but Genevieve barely noticed, buoyed as she was by the prospect of imminent freedom. Her seatmate on the plane was a young Greek man, flying to Paris on business. He was dark and handsome, and despite his nice gray suit and sleek leather briefcase, he smelled like the beach: warm sunshine on bare skin, mixed with exotic spices. After perfunctory hellos, she brought out her book and he put in earbuds and closed his eyes.

The moment the airplane reached altitude, an exquisite blond flight attendant came by, offering flutes of champagne to everyone of legal drinking age. Upon first glance Genevieve had an irrational thought: Could this be the same woman who had escorted her to Paris so many years ago?

No, of course not; far too much time had passed. This was simply what so many Frenchwomen looked like: slender, elegant, gracious—a flurry of adjectives came to mind, not one of which described Genevieve.

Genevieve thought of herself as ordinary, clumsy, even evasive. She had inherited her mother's thick auburn hair and deep brown eyes, but otherwise she felt run-of-the-mill, slightly shorter than average. Thirty-three years old, unhappy, and on the verge of divorce. It dawned on her, only then, that she was almost the same age her mother had been when Angela went to visit her brother in the Village Saint-Paul, a last hurrah before Genevieve was born.

Was she unconsciously retracing her mother's footsteps? That sounded like something Jason would propose, now that he was in therapy. Probably his life coach would suggest that Genevieve had never gotten over her mother's death and that she was running away in search of answers.

No kidding,
she thought. Could anyone who hadn't lost a parent early truly understand the extent of the loss? Was it even worth trying to explain?

Angela's death was the brutal dividing line in Genevieve's life: First she had a mother, and then she didn't. The course of the devastation was swift, with only a few weeks from initial detection of the disease to her death. Not even long enough for extended family to be notified and called to her bedside. Her husband and children were still in denial when Angela's remains were whisked away, leaving them stunned and mortified, awkwardly shuffling through their days, tending to the animals, not talking. Angela hadn't wanted a memorial service; instead, she requested that her husband and children sprinkle her ashes at the base of the dusty old sycamore tree, the one that shaded the turkey shed. Nick suggested they plant a rosebush in her memory, but Angela had laughed and said no, that if the bush died it would be like her leaving yet again.
“The sycamore's a better bet,”
she'd said with a smile.
“Nothing will kill that thing. And I'll be perfect fertilizer.”

Three weeks after Angela's death Genevieve experienced the fresh new hell of Mother's Day. During school Genevieve was allowed to read in the library while her classmates made cards, but she couldn't avoid the fund-raisers selling carnation posies. See's Candies, the local florist, even the grocery store . . . she had felt inundated at every turn by the push to celebrate the mother who had abandoned her by dying, who had left her with a yawning void in her life, a need that ran so deep and dark that Genevieve feared she would never reach the bottom, no matter how far she dared dive into the abyss.

Yet another good reason to move to France,
Genevieve thought.
No Mother's Day.

Or . . . was there? Had they, too, been infected with this Hallmark holiday? Sometimes it snuck up without warning, like in her senior year of high school, when her father took her to Philadelphia for college tours of Penn and Drexel. Jim saw it as an opportunity to teach his daughter a little about history, insisting on shepherding her to see the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. While walking downtown they spied a plaque dedicated to Anne Jarvis, who had begun the tradition of Mother's Day as a tribute to her own mother, and who then lobbied for it to become a national holiday.

“Screw Mother's Day,”
Genevieve had muttered under her breath, and Jim, her sad, stoic, somber father, who normally admonished her to watch her language, for once seemed to understand his rebellious daughter.

He nodded thoughtfully and said,
“I'm with you, kid.”

•   •   •

A
flight attendant came by and offered more champagne. Champagne in economy class: You had to love the French. But with the second glass, a gnawing uncertainty took root in Genevieve's belly.

Ever since hearing about her uncle's passing and Catharine's suggestion that Genevieve take over his shop, Genevieve had been absolutely sure of what she wanted. Her mind had remained focused on escape, the safe passage away from her current life that Paris seemed to offer. But . . . who was she to think she could make a new life
anywhere
, much less in Paris? She had already begun the paperwork to request permission to work as a foreign national, but the officials at the Consulat de France had warned her it would be a grueling, time-consuming process.

And even if she succeeded in that, she would have to figure out how to become certified as a locksmith to maintain the business. Genevieve still practiced opening old thrift-store locks while watching TV many evenings, but locksmithing involved more than just picking locks. She didn't even speak French, just a few scattered phrases remembered from childhood, a couple of long-ago courses at college, plus the little bit she convinced herself she could learn online. She had planned to continue to study on the plane, but of course a few hours of intensive language acquisition would not be enough to do the trick. How was she supposed to operate a business in a foreign land, in a foreign
language
?

And the only souls she knew in France were her
tante
Pasquale, who was, according to her cousin Catharine's infrequent e-mails, now beset by dementia; and of course Catharine herself, who had always been a tad strange.

“I don't really like the French,” Mary had said with characteristic forthrightness when Genevieve told her she was moving to Paris.

“How many French people do you know?”

“None,” she said with a shrug. “But still.”

Mary was one of the things Genevieve would miss about the U.S. Most of her other friends were conditional: old school friends or work friends or couples friends. Even though Jason was the one who had had the affair, he was keeping the majority of their mutual acquaintances in the separation. With her blessing.

She pulled out her notebook—a pretty one she'd bought for the trip, wrapped in faux red leather and embossed with what looked like ancient scribblings—and began a list. Blue ink on heavy white sketch paper.
I will miss:

1. Mary

2. Convenience stores open twenty-four hours

3. Mexican food

4. Redwood trees

Her pen hovered above the paper. What else?

Her father had passed away last year. Her brother, Nick? Not really. Not if she was being honest. He was still working the family farm in Petaluma, which was newly chic because trendy, upscale restaurants adored his organic specialties, not only vegetables but things like homemade free-range pork sausage. Nick's wife was an earnest, well-put-together woman who spoke to the farm animals in baby talk and commuted to a nondescript job in San Francisco's financial district that paid a good salary, with benefits. They traded occasional phone calls, and there were dinners at Christmas and birthdays, but otherwise they rarely spoke or visited.

Surely there were other things Genevieve would miss. People didn't just leave their native land without regret. It wasn't as though she was fleeing war or famine.

After a long moment, she added one more item to her list:
The Golden Gate Bridge
. Then she put away the notebook and opened the computer to continue her French lessons. As the hours ticked by, dinner was served—good food served with free wine, this being a French airline—and Genevieve started two different novels but found herself dissatisfied with each; worked on the
New York Times
crossword puzzle until she was stumped by the name of the German mathematician who invented set theory; then turned back to her French-language page.

The foreign words—most of which contained far too many vowels—started to blur and bob. She closed her computer to save the battery, shut her eyes, and fell asleep envisioning the Paris that she had visited so many years before.

The pilot's voice came over the loudspeaker: They had begun their descent into Paris.