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  For Sabrea

  Le rayon d’en haut does not always shine upon us and may well be hidden behind clouds, but without that light a man cannot live and is worth nothing and can do no good, and those who claim that man can live without faith in that higher light and need not trouble to acquire it, are sure to have their hopes dashed.

  —VINCENT VAN GOGH IN A LETTER TO HIS BROTHER, THEO VAN GOGH

  1

  When it comes you will know it, when it comes you will know it, Jon repeated to himself. It came and went and he didn’t know it until two stops past. He had counted before he got on the metro. Eight stops. And he counted because he wasn’t able to see the signs on the wall in the metro halls, the bodies crammed together, a mob of Parisian heads surrounding him and crowding the door in the evening’s busiest hour. So he counted and stood in the middle and subtracted one at each stop. He had three to go and that’s when he began repeating When it comes you will know it. And then he started thinking about Estelle at home in the apartment, sitting next to the telephone, organizing their flyer campaign for high-traffic street corners and bus stops and metro lines, and now he realizes he’s two stops past.

  “Goddammit,” he mumbles, and a man holding a bag of groceries looks at him blankly.

  The plan was for Jon to be in prime position to hand out the flyers in the Gare du Nord metro station before the six o’clock crowd, but he stopped for a drink that became three. He knows Estelle won’t know. She won’t leave that phone in case the police call and she trusts him to do this right but he had to have a drink. He can’t help but have a drink before he goes into the metro with a stack of orange flyers that have a picture of his nine-year-old daughter in the middle, surrounded with AIDEZ-NOUS À RETROUVER JENNIFER written in bold black letters. He simply can’t help it.

  The metro stops and he bumps out of the door with a pack of others. He moves with the crowd along the passageways of the rue Montmartre stop. It takes going up and down stairs and through a rounded hallway to get to the other side of the tracks. People are everywhere and in a steady shuffle, ready to get home, put up their feet, have their dinner, read their paper. The train arrives and this time he concentrates, gets on late so he can stand near the door, see out of the window. Back two stops to Gare du Nord, where five metro lines and half of Paris collide and there is every kind of face—old, pretty, tired, laughing, cynical, white, brown, round, thin, childish, hollow. No matches for Jennifer. No little girl with thin, wavy hair and green eyes, wearing jeans and a pink backpack and her heavy coat. Two months and nothing. Two months of her dancing in his head in this outfit. He stops at the foot of the escalator, where people cluster in an impatient pack, and passes out the orange flyers. Some take, some ignore. The ones that take fold and stuff it without looking, maybe will find it later when they reach into their pockets or purses as they pay for bread on the walk home, will say to themselves, Where did this come from? And he wonders the same. This day, this moment, this getting here, this standing at the escalator. Where did this come from? This slow, slow ticking of the clock. The crowd thins as the time between trains expands, and out of a stack of two hundred flyers, he keeps five to post on the exits that lead up into the streets.

  He gets onto the escalator and the woman on the step in front of him sees what he’s holding and says, “I have seen this. On the news. You haven’t found her yet?”

  Jon shakes his head and says, “Not yet.”

  “You should go on television again,” she says and turns away. He feels confident that if universal law allowed it, he could put his hands around her neck and choke her until her mouth was dry.

  The walkways’ and intersections’ exits and entrances are organized chaos and he is nearly knocked down over and over working his way through the traffic. When he’s done sticking up the last one, he looks at his watch and times for thirty seconds, then counts how many people look at their flyer.

  Two. Which is up one from last week when he posted at the Gare de l’Est.

  He gets on the metro and heads back home. At the café at the end of his street Monsieur Conrer serves him another drink, and when he goes into the apartment Estelle is perched on a stool next to the phone in the kitchen, cigarette in one hand and red marker in the other. She looks up, smokes, then says, “How’d it go?”

  They have stopped sleeping in the same room because they don’t sleep. Estelle takes the couch and Jon lies in the bedroom. He hears her all hours of the night—pacing, opening the refrigerator door, changing channels. Jon tries to trick himself into sleeping by imagining they’re on a long vacation and Jennifer is left behind with friends. Sometimes Estelle will come into the bedroom and crawl over close to him, rest her head on his chest, curl herself into a ball. She is a combination of smells—of perfume, of cigarettes, of coffee. But she doesn’t ever stay curled next to him for long.

  On empty afternoons, when alone in the apartment, each of them has tried to go into Jennifer’s room and make her bed, put her shoes away in the closet, close the teen fashion magazine lying open on her nightstand. Jon had laughed when she held it out to him in the bookstore and said she needed it. “Need? Nine is a single-digit number. That information is for girls with double-digit birthdays.” She looked down at it, ran her hand across the glossy cover, as if she could feel herself in the perfect face staring back at her. “Let’s just pretend I’m twelve,” she said. He took it and made her promise not to tell her mother. Which she did the moment they walked into the apartment. Later that night, with Jennifer asleep between them on the couch, Estelle had reached over and playfully smacked the back of Jon’s head and said, “Don’t rush her.”

  So they go into the room, but tiptoe around the way it is. Careful not to disrupt her life. They keep the door half open, giving themselves a glimpse of the life that was as they walk down the hallway.

  Even life upside down has its routine. Estelle stays at home on high alert but Jon has to go to work because the earth keeps spinning. So he shows up at L’École des Langues at nine a.m. every weekday morning, goes to his desk, assorts his tasks for the day, and then the knocks and bumps of an office distract him until he walks back into the street in the evening. His coworkers can’t figure out how to treat him. Too normal and they risk apathy. Too sympathetic and they become patronizing. What he gets are overly cautious smiles when he’s handed a fax or offered a smoke or asked about something he should have done already. Hidden sympathy in tiny gestures that he appreciates but he would rather them kick a hole in the side of his desk and scream, “What the fuck is the world coming to!”

  This is the story they were told—Jennifer’s class went to the Musée d’Orsay with their teacher and a volunteer parent. A typical field trip in a typical Paris day. She was there as they sat in a circle in front of a van Gogh. She was there as they sat in a circle in front of a Cézanne. She was there when they ate their sack lunches in the courtyard. She was not there when they counted heads to walk to the bus stop to go back to school. She was not there as the teacher retraced their footsteps. She was not in the bathroom. She was not in the gift shop. She was not in the snack area buying a chocolate bar, which she had a tendency to do on field trips. She was not anywhere.

  Their flyer campaign is in full swing and twice a week after work Jon goes through the same ro
utine he went through at the Gare du Nord. They change colors from orange to yellow. Estelle thinks they are easier to read in passing. They try a larger-size paper. They move the telephone numbers of the apartment and of the detective from the bottom to the top.

  After doing his duty at the Place d’Italie metro station, Jon stops at Monsieur Conrer’s café next door to their apartment building. It’s winter and dark at 6:30, the lights from the shops glowing yellow in the early night. He knows Estelle is waiting but he can’t go up, not yet ready to hide his despair. Monsieur Conrer has a glass of whiskey waiting for him as he comes in.

  “Where today?” he says as Jon sits down at the bar.

  “Place d’Italie.”

  “A good spot. Something will happen,” he says. His hair is thin and silver and his shoulders slump. He has his own children and grandchildren and he has cried for Jennifer. It happened a week after she disappeared. Jon talked Estelle out of the apartment on a Saturday afternoon and they came and sat here at the table by the window. They shared a carafe of wine and Jon got up to go to the bathroom. When he came back, M. Conrer was sitting with Estelle, they held hands across the table, and they both cried quietly. Jon stepped back into the bathroom and watched through the cracked door until they were finished. Ever since, this is one of the few places she will go. M. Conrer tells Jon every day, “You are one day closer to having Jennifer home.” Jon drinks the first whiskey and asks for another.

  “Estelle came in for lunch today,” M. Conrer says.

  Jon hears him but doesn’t answer. M. Conrer lays his pack of cigarettes in front of Jon and he takes one.

  This time, when the old man tells him you’re one day closer, Jon says, “The chances are dying by the minute. I’ve read the books.”

  “Don’t think like that.”

  “That’s the least of what I think. If you could see what I think, you’d throw up on your shoes.”

  “Don’t think that either,” he says.

  But Jon has. And does. Is there only one? Or two or four, or do they rotate, charge a fee, bring them down a thin alley, into a short door, sell her off in ten-minute intervals. Are there women too? He doesn’t want to think these thoughts and he fights them when they arrive but they are as real as his hands and feet. When he prays, he prays that she can at least be given a civil abduction. M. Conrer reaches over with the bottle and makes it a double. Then the bell on the door jingles and Estelle walks in and takes a stool beside Jon.

  “Detective Marceau called and said he has seen the flyers and that we’re doing a good job,” she says and this has given her a satisfaction, a hope that he notices in her eyebrows.

  “Good. Did he say anything else?”

  “Only that they’re working hard. And that maybe we should up the reward.” She takes a cigarette from M. Conrer’s pack. “Was Place d’Italie a very busy spot?”

  No, it wasn’t.

  “Yeah, pretty busy,” he answers.

  “Can we go up to thirty thousand?”

  They started at fifteen. After a month they went to twenty. “Whatever we need to do,” Jon says and makes the mistake of sighing.

  “That didn’t sound very convincing.”

  “I said whatever we need to do.”

  “It’s the way you said it.”

  “Estelle. A million. I don’t care. I’m on your side.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” she says and throws her cigarette at him. “Maybe we should just quit. Just quit and move away and act like we never had a daughter.”

  “Gimme a goddamn break. I’m tired.”

  “And I’m not?” she says and bangs her fist on the bar. Then she’s up and crying before she can get out of the door.

  He knocks off the drink and asks for another.

  “Are you sure you want another?” M. Conrer says.

  “I don’t know.” He shakes his head, then points at the empty glass. “Yeah, I’m sure,” he says. “Just let me sit.” M. Conrer pours and walks away, gives him the solitude he asks for. Jon watches as the old man moves to other customers, offers matches, chats about the weather, and wonders if he would be so certain, so comforting, if one of his children were forever nine years old.

  M. Conrer finally says he’s not pouring any more. Jon leaves without paying and takes the metro to Saint-Michel. He thought whiskey warmed but the wind blows through his light jacket and he shivers as he moves up rue Saint-Séverin through the neon and smell of lamb. He makes his way through the Latin Quarter and to the river and walks along the sidewalk.

  Nighttime dinner cruises ease by, waiters in tuxedos delivering wine and salads to the tables of the brightly lit cabins. A white foam trailing the boats. A misty rain starting to fall. He reaches the Pont des Arts and the lights of Paris—the high-priced apartments lining the river, the illumination of Notre-Dame behind him, the way the spotlights of the Louvre reach into the clouds—even in the damp night they are golden, something heavenly. He had stood there with Jennifer many times, and once, as she looked down into the river and what surrounded them, she said, “If I jumped I bet I could fly.” Then she thought about it and said, “Or probably drown.” He figured she was too light to drown, but fly, maybe. And he said, “I feel certain you’d fly but let’s not try it today.” She held out her arms and swayed. “Like this,” she said. “I’d fly like this.”

  He turns up the collar on his coat and walks toward the Musée d’Orsay.

  It’s several blocks, time enough for the mist to wet his face and dampen his hair. He and Estelle walked this neighborhood for days, in all directions from the museum, looking for Jennifer’s backpack or barrette or ID card. She’s a smart little girl, he kept assuring Estelle, smart enough to leave a sign. But after days, then weeks, he’d admitted to himself that they weren’t smart enough to find it. On the sidewalk along the river, a bench faces the front doors of the museum and he believes if he sits there long enough, Jennifer will come around the corner, or stick her head from around a tree and say, “Ha! Remember that time you grounded me for stealing your cigars and selling them on the playground? Got you back!”

  He moves along through the mist, and when he gets to the bench, it’s already occupied. With Estelle.

  “Can I sit down?” he asks.

  She looks up and says, “The way you wobbled along the sidewalk, you’d probably better.”

  She’s more prepared for the night than he, bundled in a thick flannel coat and her neck wrapped in a scarf. She sits slumped with her arms folded and hands tucked under her armpits.

  “Been here long?” he asks.

  “Hour or so.”

  “Still hate me?”

  She sits up straight. “Not really.”

  “What the fuck is the world coming to?” he says and it sounds just like he wants it to.

  “It’s come and gone, I think. It passed into Shitsville when we weren’t looking.”

  They know better than to laugh but they do and it’s as if this is the first joke they’ve ever shared. Like a long-forgotten memory. She moves closer to him and he puts his arm around her.

  “You smell like a bottle,” she says.

  “But I’m okay. Where do we post tomorrow?”

  “Nowhere. We’re out of flyers. It’ll be day after tomorrow before our next order is ready,” she says, then she slides down and puts her head in his lap and feet up on the bench. The mist turns into a drizzle but the wind has died. She closes her eyes. Jon watches people walk back and forth in front of the Musée d’Orsay. They look up and around, cup their hands and peek into the lobby, tourists who believe museums keep minimart hours. A man and a woman without hats or umbrellas notice Jon and Estelle across the street on the bench and they hurry across the traffic and over to them. The man’s face is smooth and slick in the rain and the woman hugs herself to keep warm. The man takes a tiny dictionary out of his pocke
t and fumbles through it but then gives up and he looks at Jon. The man points across the street at the museum and says slowly, “The mu-seum. O-pen? O-pen time?” And then he makes a motion with his hands as if he’s opening a giant book.

  Jon leans forward and says, “Go. The fuck. Away.”

  The man and woman look at each other, assuring themselves that this is what they have heard. Then they walk away along the sidewalk, looking back over their shoulders at the man who is staring.

  “That was good,” Estelle says.

  Jon brushes the wet hair away from her face, touches the wrinkles in her forehead. He asks if she wants to get out of the weather but she says, “No. It feels good.”

  He lays his head back, listens to the traffic, listens to the river. The days, the weeks. Now the months. The accumulation is heavy and he is almost out when Estelle sits up and softly slaps his cheek.

  “Wake up,” she says. Her dark hair is flat on her head and she licks the moistness from her upper lip. “Let’s go get drunk somewhere. Somewhere close before I change my mind.”

  “Fine,” he says. “But I’ve got a head start.”

  “I’ll catch you.”

  She stands, takes his hand and pulls him to his feet. They walk back toward Saint-Michel, where they’ll find a warm seat in a café at a table for two in a back corner. Where they’ll spend more than they want to. Where they’ll drink and smoke and throw out meaningless comments about the music or the waitress’s shoes. Where they’ll talk themselves into expectation.

  2

  Jon’s mother was a thin, French-Swiss girl who moved to New York City when she was nineteen. She came to study dance but within a year she had married Jon’s father, an all-American boy with a fullback’s jaw. He was on the tail end of a modeling career and they scraped by in a three-room apartment in the city for several years. When she became pregnant with Jon, they moved back to the South to his father’s hometown and his father ended up a branch manager of a bank.