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.
“That was a bust,” I tell them when we come out onto the pavement. The cloud layer that has been sitting over Paris for the last few days has burned off while we were waiting inside, and the day has turned hot and clear. “At least you can salvage the rest of the afternoon. Get some food and have a picnic in the Luxembourg Gardens.”
I can see the idea is tempting. No one rebuffs it. “But we promised we’d be your wingmen,” Kelly says. “We can’t let you do this alone.”
