When Leon asked why her sister had called, Juliana told him that Louise wanted to know if she’d given any more thought to her offer of the spare bedroom in her San Francisco loft. It seemed every friend or relative Juliana spoke with encouraged her to return to the States and resume her old teaching job or move to another city and start over, unable to understand why, after everything that had happened, she could stand to stay in Paris any longer.
“Have you given it any thought?” he asked.
“Not very much.” It wasn’t that she wanted so badly to remain in Paris; more than anything, she was incapable of deciding, of striking in a different, unknown direction, and was frustrated by her inability to release herself from her life as easily as her husband had, a top spiraling across a flat surface.
“I visited her in San Francisco two years ago,” she continued. “But I can’t even remember what the city looks like now.” When she thought of California, the only thing that came into her mind was the dense fog that hung over the bay, as though the clouds had sunk down to meet the earth.
The train entered a tunnel and the rush of darkness reminded her of the incident on the metro, which she relayed to Leon.
“I haven’t seen a thing about it on the news,” she said. “It was like we just fell out of the world for a moment, then jumped back in.” She remembered the lights coming back on and seeing a shattered egg near her feet, the yellow yolk oozing onto the floor. “Toward the end, Cole became convinced the Metro was going to be bombed. By the time he left, he’d spent hundreds of Euros in taxi fares.”
“I think your husband was afraid of the wrong things,” Leon said.
“Really? Was he?” She crossed legs. “When I was down there, for a second I thought everything he’d feared was coming to pass. That he’d been in his right mind after all.”
“But he was always looking to the outside, finding danger in shadows.” Leon tapped his chest. “What about what’s in here?”
Juliana suddenly felt restless and wanted to be off the train, in the open air. She asked Leon how much longer until they reached Marseille.
“Less than an hour,” he said, pointing to the river they were passing. Juliana looked out the window in time to see the little blue and white boats tied to the banks, the paint gleaming in the sunlight, cheerful hostages.
After they arrived at the Marseille train station, she followed Leon into a parking lot, where he stopped in front of the Smart Car he’d rented and unlocked the doors. Near the end of the train ride, he’d mentioned wanting to drop in on a friend before going to the beach and she had agreed, wondering if they would be visiting someone from his youth.
Juliana sank into the passenger seat and opened her satchel to check her cell phone, noticing a new voicemail. When she listened to the message, no one spoke, although she thought she heard the faint static of breath, a low sound that deepened and shifted like wind. A wrong number, she told herself, although she couldn’t help but imagine the caller might be Cole, phoning for something that couldn’t be explained in a voicemail, and felt a flush spread down her neck when she realized the missed call was listed as an unknown number. Or, she wondered, could the caller be Fredrick. Her number was in the school directory, so it was possible. Was he angry that she’d spoken to his mother? What would he have said if she’d answered? It was too much for her, these pointless speculations. She turned off her phone and tossed her bag into the backseat.
“A good day for swimming,” Leon said. He drove with one hand on the bottom of the steering wheel. The sun was full and shone brightly against his face. “After our visit, we’ll go to the beach.” He turned onto a two-lane road. “It’s only a little farther south.”
She hadn’t been to a beach since her college years, always favoring the enclosure of cities. When the weather turned warm in Paris, she joined the groups who lay on the concrete banks of the Seine in their shorts and bathing suits or went to the enormous fountain near the Palais De Chaillot, where she could dangle her legs into the water and feel the spray from the fountainhead. She liked the anonymity of being deep in a crowd, of temporarily forgetting all the days that had come before. But a real beach, with pale sand and deep waters. She looked at Leon, cupping her hand over her eyes to block the sun. “I think that’ll be nice,” she said.
She leaned forward in her seat and watched the scenery, struck by the disparity of the terrain. She felt moisture in the air, yet the ground was dry and hard. One moment, the plants and trees were gray and arid, then they rounded a corner and were met with lush color. The land was flat for miles and then blossomed into impressive rises. They passed a vineyard, rows of low green plants, and an overgrown field with a dilapidated farmhouse in the center. In the distance, she saw the purple silhouettes of mountains.
She noticed a man walking down the road. He resembled, from afar, her husband, the same lanky build. He appeared to be wearing a pinstriped coat and carrying a briefcase, walking with a swiftness that seemed out of place in the country. But as they passed him, she realized his face, his soft features, looked nothing like Cole’s; the briefcase was actually a toolbox, the man’s jacket frayed and dusty. She recalled the early days of Cole’s disappearance, scrambling to catch up to a man in the metro station, darting across the street to follow someone who had (she thought) his walk, staring through the window of a restaurant at a diner who held a spoon in the same way. She had grown used to these tricks of the mind.
Although they had lived on the outskirts of Boston and hadn’t been directly impacted by the attacks in New York, Cole had fallen into a dark period that lasted until Christmas, attending every meeting on port and transit security that was open to the public and trying to push his way into some that weren’t, detouring to avoid the busiest bridges, working from home as much as possible to limit his time in the Financial District. But it had passed and she never imagined a resurgence. After all, the media was flooded with stories about people suffering from post-traumatic stress; his behavior had seemed understandable. It wasn’t until the Paris riots that she realized how much he’d changed, as though some dark seed buried inside him had found the ideal conditions for growth. And after he left, she was forced to recognize how she’d changed as well, her determined cheerfulness and willful ignorance, her ability to read the newspaper and then push the unpleasantness from her mind (how typical, how bourgeoisie, how very American, she thought now), as though the world wasn’t shifting very much at all, as though everything wasn’t disintegrating beneath them.
They passed an old couple standing in a pasture, rows of stone houses with pink and yellow shutters, and then a field of red poppies, the petals delicate and thin as tracing paper. She wondered if someone had planted them or if they had taken root naturally. She asked Leon to pull over and he did. She got out of the car and walked into the field. He rolled down the window and watched her.
She stepped carefully to avoid flattening the poppies. The soil was cracked and brown. It seemed miraculous that such brilliant color had emerged from this parched square of land. She bent over and pulled a flower from the ground. A breeze passed over the field, bending the stems of the plants. She crushed the petals in her fist, the little slivers of red pushing between her fingers like silk. The poppy was soft and damp in her hand. From the center of the field, it felt like she was surrounded by a thousand tiny faces.