“I mean he’d like them.”
“Yah,” she said. “They are cute.”
Her eyes were on the tiny Crusaders in the window. The rose in its plastic cone had begun to droop.
“We used to make things like this when he was little. Castles and knights, and I remember a catapult—do you know what that is? We built one out of Popsicle sticks and a wooden spoon.”
“Yah?” the girl said.
“That was a long time ago,” I said. “My son is in college now. But he’s studying history.” I nodded to the knights. “Just this sort of thing.”
In fact, I’d had the idea that this trip to Paris might be something my son and I would do together. With his high school French I could have used his help and he would have liked the research—we could have made an adventure out of it. I’d imagined that he’d be the one to find it: a picture of my mother hidden away in the Paris archives all these years. A photograph Carter Bristol never looked too closely at because her face was blurry while her feet were clear. Or maybe a snapshot from a garden party at someone’s chateau: a country brook, a dark-haired woman with eyes like flecks on the negative, the flash a second too late to catch her smile as she leans and dips one toe. Her arms held out for balance, in one hand a pair of shoes with straps that cross, two creases each where the buckle bit the leather, one deep, one only faintly there. And my son, Wow, Dad. Just like you said.
The girl was looking at me again, closely. Then she smiled. “So you are here together?”
“My son? No, no, he’s not here with me. I’m afraid I’m on my own,” I said.
“Ah, okay, I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t quite meet my eyes. After a moment she said, “So you come for—reunion?” and she put a slight emphasis on the last word, stretching the syllables and mispronouncing the u.
“A reunion? No, did I say that?”
The girl half-laughed to apologize. “Yeah, I have thought you said something. Like something about reunion with the family.”
“Well, I probably did,” I said. It wasn’t the first time I’ve caught myself thinking out loud. I hadn’t meant to embarrass her, so I said, “It’s funny how those things slip out.”
“Sorry?” she said.
“It’s just that you’re right, actually.” The long flight or the sudden switch of hemispheres must have jostled my subconscious, because, though I couldn’t remember ever calling it that, even inside my own head, a reunion was exactly what I’d pictured: my son and I searching through old documents for a glimpse of his grandmother. Finishing a day’s work at the archives, comparing our notes on Inga Beart’s life in Paris over a glass of beer as evening set in. The three of us, reunited, somehow, across time.
The girl was still looking at me, so I said, “I’ve come to do some research. Family research. And my son, he likes all that. I thought—a trip to Paris. It was going to be a present. For his birthday.”
“Yah, that can be nice,” the girl said.
Of course, when I called my son to suggest the trip, the conversation didn’t go at all as I had planned. “Be reasonable, Dad,” was what he really said when I started to explain about Carter Bristol’s footnote and the possibility of finally finding a photo that includes her shoes. “Memories are wrong all the time,” he told me. In the end I never got around to asking if he’d like to come with me to Paris.
“But you know, these things,” I said to the girl. “Sometimes they don’t work out.”
“Yah,” she said. “Things usually can be like this.”
The girl’s expression, which a moment before had seemed so intently focused on the details of my face, was all politeness now—after all, she’d simply asked me for directions. I was probably making her uncomfortable going on like that.
“Here,” I said. I took out the map I’d bought at the airport and gave it to her, flustered. “Maybe you can ask someone else about the station.”
She gave me a brief smile. “For me?” she said. “Okay, thanks.”
She glanced down at the map, then tucked it under her arm and turned to look in the window of the shoe repair shop, cupping her hands to block the glare as if something inside had caught her eye.
I picked up Aunt Cat’s suitcase but I hesitated a moment before going on. There was something indescribably non-American about the girl’s cadence, and the particular way she’d said yah and okay reminded me of someone, an Eastern European lady named Diana who used to come help out around the house. I wished I’d thought to ask the girl where she was from, though I realized how ignorant I would seem to her. We get so few foreigners out our way, I suppose to me most of them sound about the same.
Still, the thought took me back to certain afternoons after Diana finished the housework, when I’d drive her back to town and we’d get to talking. Sometimes I’d take her out to lunch. I stopped calling her after Uncle Walt passed away last fall, because to be honest I didn’t like the idea of her cleaning up after me alone. I thought of asking her over socially, except, of course, the house was a mess, and pretty soon her visa was up. Before the holidays she called to tell me she was going home and we made a rather elaborate plan to exchange gifts anyway—our kids are both over in England and Diana thought it would be a shame not to have them meet. But Christmas came, then spring, then summer, and by the time I left for Paris I still hadn’t heard whether she’d received the little things I’d sent for my son to pass along—and no package to me from Diana ever arrived.
The girl with the suitcase was still looking in the shop window. She’d clearly forgotten all about me. I didn’t want to startle her by continuing our conversation, and it would have embarrassed us both if I’d tried to explain the little pang I felt at the sibilance of her t’s. But just then all I could remember was the way Diana’s laughter had its own accent, so that even when she was laughing you could tell she was a foreigner. I wished I had something funny to say to the girl, something that would make her turn around and laugh out loud, just to hear if hers was the same.
Instead I counted to myself again, one-one-thousand two, to clear my head. I got a better grip on Aunt Cat’s suitcase and nodded toward the girl, who was still intent on the window, and I walked on down the street a little more quickly than I needed to.