The Paris Widow, page 3
“Excusez-moi.”
It’s a woman. Silk dress, sensible leather pumps, a fluffy white poodle on an orange leash. The epitome of Parisian chic, her shoulders drooped slightly with age. I smile and step backward, giving both of them ample room to pass.
Once, on an overnight flight from JFK to Marrakech, a sharp bout of turbulence shook the Airbus so hard it knocked me to the ground. That’s the first thing I think when the ground underneath us pitches. The jolt feels the same, a violent wave of pressurized air that sends me flying into the building behind me. One second I’m standing there, watching the woman and her dog pass by on the sidewalk; the next, my shoulder bone slams the bricks with a hard thwack, pain radiating down my arm and back. I register a scream before I realize it’s mine.
I press myself flat to the building until the ground stops shaking, my fingertips searching for purchase on the flat facade. My brain tries to make sense of what just happened.
An earthquake?
No, that can’t be right. My eardrums are ringing, not just from the shock but a thundering clap. A boom that shook the streets and jolted me backward. My chest heaves with realization. Oh, my God. This was an explosion.
A few feet away, the poodle is losing its mind, barking and dancing around the elderly woman, sprawled face down on the sidewalk. I hear its incessant yipping just before I notice everything else. Screams. Car alarms. And in the distance, sirens. A swell of sound pushing through the ringing in my ears.
I push myself off the wall and rush over. “Madame. Ça va?”
More how’s it going than how are you, but I can’t come up with the French word for hurt.
Beyond her, the glass walls of a bus stop fall to the ground, shattering into a million beads of glass that scatter across the sidewalk and street. They glitter in the sun like diamonds.
The woman doesn’t respond, so I grab the dog’s leash and tug it away from its owner, crouching over her, my mind rolling through the first-aid steps, beginning with assess. Did she hit her head? Injure her neck or her spine? I take in her limbs spread every which way, the way her shoulders rise and fall with breath, thank God, but the rest of her is still.
Rolling her over can do more damage than good—I’ve done enough first-aid trainings to know that. Plus, she’s at an age where bones can shatter at the simplest fall, and this one was far from simple. This was a blast that shot her into the concrete.
I look around, scanning the street for help. A bewildered man climbs out of his car, stopped crosswise in the middle of the road, like he slammed the brakes hard enough to skid sideways. Farther up the sidewalk, three people break into a sprint.
Shit.
I turn back to the woman, conjugating the French word for break in my head—casse, casses, casse, cassons, cassez—when she moans. She rolls onto her side, and the dog lunges for her face, licking a cheek stained with dirt and smudged lipstick but, thankfully, no blood.
“Oh, thank God,” I say, and it’s enough for her. She answers in rapid-fire French, something about a sister and a lunch date and one word that tingles every hair on the back of my neck: terroristes.
Is that what this was, a terrorist attack? Jesus.
She bats a crepey hand in my direction, gesturing for me to help her to her feet. I’m careful to support her in case she did break a bone. Her hands are scraped, there’s a thin line of blood snaking down her shin and, judging by the steady stream of French tumbling out of her mouth, she’s probably in shock. I don’t catch even half of it.
“English?” I say, but she doesn’t so much as pause. I let her ramble on, thinking back to that ominous word. Terroristes.
It wasn’t all that long ago that this city suffered through a string of them, coordinated attacks after some magazine published an offensive cartoon. I remember the signs plastered all over the city and every website—je suis Charlie. For Parisians like this lady, people who lived through the horror, the attacks are fresh enough that her mind would automatically go there.
I see it, too, on the faces of the people stepping out into the street, ducking their heads out of shops and upstairs windows. Not what’s wrong? but again? A mixture of resignation and disgust.
I do a slow spin, taking in the street. The stopped cars, the sunny square, the ancient buildings of brick and limestone. If it weren’t for the boom still echoing in my bones and the disheveled old lady stumbling away with her poodle, I might think I’d imagined it. Across the street, the church bells peal out a solemn song—1:00 p.m. It’s the time I was supposed to be ready and waiting for Adam at the hotel.
I pull out my phone and call him, alarm beginning to prickle in my limbs. His phone rings four times, then shoots me to voicemail.
“Babe, call me. There was just a big explosion, and I want to hear your voice. I love you. Call me.”
I hit End and follow it up with a text message: CALL ME, in all caps.
I slide the phone back into my bag and turn in the direction I just came from. The way Adam would be coming from once he fetched his sunglasses from the table. I stare up the pretty street, half expecting to see him jogging toward me, his face filled with fear and relief. A breeze kicks up, shaking the leaves in the trees, but otherwise, the street is quiet and empty.
Too empty.
It’s then I spot it, the thick column of smoke swirling into a clear blue sky. It rises like a black ghost over the treetops and zinc-tiled roofs, a billowing streak of filth and fire.
I see it, and I start running.
Three
The alleyway is thick with people—a surge of bodies swarming out of the smoke. I push up on the tips of my toes, but I’m five and a half feet on a good day and all I see are heaving chests and panicked faces. A steady stream of people coming at me, a human stampede jostling me backward. My lungs singe with the charcoal odor of fresh fire.
I catch garbled snippets of French as they pass, a lot of it curse words. Putain de bordel de merde. Loosely translated, holy motherfucking shit. Their expressions—tense, dazed, relieved to be alive—tell me I’m headed the right way.
It hits me again, all at once, what happened. An explosion. A bomb. I think it and my legs go limp with fear. These people are running from disaster, from danger, and so far none of them are Adam.
My heart seizes with slippery terror, and I tell myself he’s back at the hotel by now, probably annoyed because I’m not there. I see him trudging up to our room at the end of the fourth floor, hear him call my name into the room, empty except for the suitcases lined up by the bathroom door. I see him tick in the passcode to the safe, where the cash and our passports are still tucked away securely inside. I see his forehead wrinkle first with irritation, then worry. He must be thinking the same thing I am right now.
Surely not. What are the chances?
A woman rams into me, a head-on collision that pushes me back an entire foot. She’s carrying a child on her hip, a little girl of about two or three who’s wailing loud enough to pierce an eardrum. Both of them are covered in white dust.
“Pardón,” I say automatically, at the same time Adam’s laughter rings through my mind. “Such a Southern belle,” he’s always teasing me. “Why apologize for something that’s not your fault?” Adam is from Chicago, where people are nice but not that nice. The woman shoves past me and then she’s gone.
I lean into the stream of people and push myself through. Forward motion. I search for him in the faces I pass.
Find him.
Then again, maybe he’s called me back by now. There’s no way I would have heard my phone ring in this overcrowded alleyway, no way I would have felt it buzzing in the messenger bag against my hip, not with all this shoving and jostling. My heart gives a hopeful jingle. Maybe all my worry is for nothing.
I thread a hand in my bag and feel around for my cell. The little side pocket where I keep it for easy reach—empty, which means it’s bouncing around at the bottom of my bag. I search for it while I push into a bottleneck of people crowding the bend in the alleyway, praying for it to buzz to life in my fingers, or at the very least, be overflowing with text messages.
Hey, gorgeous.
I’m back at the hotel, where are you?
I’m worried.
I’m fine.
Please, for the love of God, let Adam have called me back.
My fingers make contact with something hard and smooth, and with a throaty sob of relief, I pull it out and swipe up with a thumb. I’m unlocking the screen when the alleyway suddenly darkens, and I look up to find a staggeringly large man looming over me. He barks at me in a Germanic language, pointing over my head, and I understand enough of it to get the gist. I’m going the wrong way.
I gesture past him, deeper into the alleyway and beyond, the square. “My husband,” I say in English, because translating those words is too much right now, and so is the gash in his hairline. It oozes a stream of ruby red down the right side of his cheek, dripping off his jawline into what was once a crisp white collar. The blood is still flowing, the fabric heavy and sticking to his skin. Whoever this man is, he needs stitches.
There are more guttural words, more gesturing to the alleyway behind me, but he turns just enough to let me squeeze past.
The man behind him isn’t as accommodating, though, and he shoulder-butts me hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. My bag catches on something—a hand, his arm. The strap pulls tight across my chest like a seat belt, tugging me back the way I came, and I jab the pointiest part of my elbow into soft flesh—a stomach, I’m guessing from the grunt that comes as a result. But the tension releases, and the bag slaps against my hip.
I lurch back into the oncoming stream of bodies so dense I can barely breathe.
My cell buzzes in my fingers, and my heart revs at the number sitting atop the text app. Ten new texts.
As I push through the crowd, I hold my breath and tap the icon with a shaky finger, my stomach falling when I see the names that float to the top. A colleague, my few friends, my boss, people who know I’m here and saw the news on CNN.
But there’s nothing new from Adam. No Hey, gorgeous, his standard opening line. No missed calls. My CALL ME text is still marked delivered but not read.
Tears burn in my eyes, but I wipe them away and tell myself he’s fine. Adam is fine, and unlike my news-obsessed friends and colleagues, he’s probably oblivious to the afternoon’s drama.
Or no—he’d be like me, running into the thick of things. To search for me, to help. He’s probably rescuing someone, wiping tears and blood with the tail of his shirt. That’s the kind of guy Adam is, the kind who would risk his own life to save others.
I tap his contact card and hit Call, then press it to my ear and pray. The line takes forever to connect, and I think of all the other millions of worried people in this city. The cell towers are probably overloaded with people like me, trying to track down their loved ones.
I’m about to hang up and try again when, by some miracle, the line finally connects. It rings four sluggish times before sending me to voicemail.
His familiar voice squeezes in my chest. “Hi, this is Adam. Please leave me a message.”
“Adam, please please please call me the second you hear this. There was some kind of explosion, and it was nearby and now I can’t find you and...I’m so scared, babe. Please call me. Please.”
I hang up and then send another all-caps text. My hands are shaking as I hit Send, a combination of fear and adrenaline that zings through my blood as I stare at the screen. Six seconds pass, then ten, then more. There are no dancing dots, no indication he might have seen the message. Another text marked delivered, but not read.
I feel it in my stomach, the dark spread of dread.
“Hey, Siri, call the Hôtel Luxembourg Parc.”
This time, the connection is almost immediate. “Bonjour, Hôtel Luxembourg Parc. How may I direct your call?”
“Bonjour, this is Stella Knox. My husband and I are staying in room 413. His name is Adam Knox. I’m hoping you can help me look for him.”
“Would you like me to connect you to the room?”
“Yes, but can you check to see if he’s checked out first?”
“Mais oui, of course, madame. One moment, please.” A pause filled with the clicking of a keyboard, a soft hum. “I see that Housekeeping reported the room as still occupied at quarter to one. Are you aware of our checkout time?”
I pull the phone away from my ear and check the clock—1:13. That gives Adam a window of some thirty minutes since I saw him last, plenty of time to fetch his glasses from the café and the bags from upstairs, to wonder where I am, to call me the fuck back.
“Can you have Housekeeping check again? Or maybe he’s already downstairs. In the lobby somewhere. He’s tall, dark hair. He’s wearing jeans and a white button-down.”
“I see at least ten men here who look like what you describe.”
“Just yell out his name. Adam Knox. Yell it really loud.”
“Madame. I can’t just—”
“Please. Help me find him. Please.”
A pause, and then she does it, asks if anyone there is named Adam Knox—first in French, then in English. I hold my breath and wait, terror lingering in my stomach like an ulcer.
“I’m sorry, madame. There is no one here answering to that name.”
My lungs deflate and so do my bones, my legs nearly folding underneath me. I slump against the wall of the alley like a rag doll. “Keep trying, please. And please call me back at this number as soon as you find him. Can you do that?”
“I... Yes, madame, of course.”
I rattle off my cell phone number and pocket my iPhone, giving myself another pep talk. Adam is probably already on his way upstairs, or probably he’s dragging our luggage into the elevator, or maybe he’s got his glasses but lost his phone. Wherever he is, he’s fine. Everything is okay. It’s got to be okay.
By now the alleyway is starting to empty out, and it occurs to me this is both good news and bad. Good because fewer people means a clear path, more bodies behind me than blocking my way. But bad because the last stragglers coming down the alleyway are more injured than the ones earlier on. More cradled limbs and contusions, covered in more grime and blood. The walking wounded.
And still, not one of them has been Adam.
Up ahead, the alleyway opens up, and I break into a jog, my necklace bouncing against my chest. I drop it inside my T-shirt without slowing down, zigzagging around the last few stragglers limping by. One of them, a man of about my age, staggers straight at me, looking like he just climbed out of a coal mine. His face is covered with soot, all but two white lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes. Tears, maybe, or sweat. He reaches for me with a moan, and I lurch to the right—horrified, both by his appearance and my response. Any other day I would stop and help this man, but not today. Today all I can think about is finding mine.
At the end of the alley, I stop and stare into the square.
Sunlight tries to pierce through the foggy smoke, which hangs over the square like an angry storm cloud. It’s louder, too, filled with the sounds of shouts and swirling sirens. In the middle of the square, the trees rise up like jagged ghosts around a fountain that’s still clattering, and it’s the strangest sensation. I can almost see myself standing here, stiff with shock, taking it all in. Like I’m floating outside my body.
The square is like a war zone. Like those disaster sites you see on the news. Like the footage from ground zero.
Only this is real. This is really happening, right now.
It takes me a full ten seconds to pick the figures out of the fog, to register that the dark smudges and lumps are bodies. Stretched out on the sunken grass. Slumped on the hoods of parked cars. Lying on the pavement between trash and debris, next to mounds of rocks and giant chunks of concrete. I scan the shapes for one that looks like Adam, but there are too many, the smoke too thick. It singes my throat and clogs my lungs. I cough into an elbow.
And then my gaze moves to the hole where a café once stood. Where less than an hour ago Adam and I sat at a tiny table pushed up against a planter overflowing with bright pink bougainvillea. Where we scarfed down the most delicious galettes and thumbed through pictures of French antiques on his phone. Where he kissed me like we were the only two people in Paris. Now there’s literally nothing left of it except the memories inside my head.
The terrace. The restaurant. The patrons and the winking chef.
All of it is gone.
Four
I stand at the edge of the square, my eyes and throat burning as bright as the flames licking out an upstairs window, two stories above where the restaurant once stood. A gaping hole in what was once a block-wide stretch of smooth, four-story limestone, now a black cave of dangling wires and charred concrete. I think of the couple eating salads next to us, the waitress with the butterfly tattoos, the people going about their day in the apartments just above, and my stomach roils with shock, with horror.
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” My voice sounds flat, as if it’s coming from a long way off, from someone else. The smoke seems to grow thicker, more suffocating.
Or maybe that’s the panic seeping in.
A man with wheat-blond hair races by in a full-on sprint, and I grab him by the sleeve, lurching him to a stop so abrupt, it drags us both into the street.
