He stares out the window for the rest of the ride.
At the hospital, I sit with Alain for a little while at Mamie’s bedside as he whispers to her.
“Do you think she can hear you?” I ask before we leave.
He smiles. “I do not know,” he says. “But doing something feels better than doing nothing. And I am telling her stories of our family, stories I have not let myself think of in seventy years. If anything will bring her back, I believe this will. I want her to know that the past is not lost, not forgotten, even if she came here and tried to erase it.”
When I get home an hour later, after dropping Alain at the library at his request, Annie is sitting in the middle of the living room floor with her legs crossed, holding the portable phone to her ear and saying, “Uh-huh . . . Uh-huh . . . Uh-huh . . . Fine.” For a moment, my eyes light up; has she found Jacob Levy? After all, the words on her end aren’t following the typical sorry-I’ve-called-the-wrong-Levys script. But then she turns and I see the look on her face.
“Yeah, fine,” I hear her say. “Whatever.” She presses the End button on the phone and slams it down on the ground.
“Honey?” I ask tentatively. I’ve stopped in the doorway between the kitchen and living room and am staring at her in concern. “Was that one of the Levys?”
“No,” she says.
“Was it one of your friends?”
“No,” she says, and this time, her voice is tighter. “It was Dad.”
“Okay,” I say. “Is there anything you want to talk about?”
She’s silent for a long time as she looks down at the carpet, which I realize I haven’t vacuumed in eons. Housekeeping is not one of my fortes. But when she looks up at me, she looks so angry that I take a step back without meaning to.
“Why did you get us into this, anyways?” Annie demands. She scrambles to her feet, her fists clenched beside her long, skinny legs that have yet to develop from those of a child into those of a young woman.
I blink at her in surprise. “Get us into what?” I ask before it occurs to me that as her mom, I should be telling her that it’s unacceptable to talk to me this way. But she’s already on a roll.
“Everything!” she screams.
“Honey, what are you talking about?” I ask carefully.
“We’re never going to find him! Jacob Levy! It’s impossible! And you don’t even care!”
My heart sinks a little. I’ve failed her once again by not preparing her better for the likelihood that this is a wild goose chase, that Jacob has already died, or that he’s disappeared because he doesn’t want to be found. I know Annie wants to believe in true love that lasts forever—probably as an antidote to the front-row seat she had to the crumbling of my marriage—but I’d hoped that I wouldn’t have to burst her bubble yet and tell her the truth. When I was twelve, I’d believed in true love too. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized it was all a sham.
I swallow hard. “Of course I care, Annie,” I begin. “But it’s possible that Jacob isn’t—”
She cuts me off before I can get the words out of my mouth. “It’s not just that!” she exclaims. She waves her long, skinny arms around some more and hardly seems to notice when her pink watchband snags her hair and gets stuck for a minute. She simply rips it free and winces momentarily before going on. “It’s everything! You ruin everything!”
I take a deep breath. “Annie, if this is about me going to Paris for a few days, I’ve already told you how much I appreciate you being responsible when I was gone.”
She rolls her eyes and stomps her left foot on the ground. “You don’t even know what I’m talking about!” she says, shooting me a withering look.
“Fine, I guess I’m an idiot!” I say. I can finally feel my temper rising. There’s a fine line between feeling sorry for my daughter and feeling annoyed by her behavior, and I can feel myself floating over that line right now. “What is it that I’ve done wrong this time?”
“It’s everything!” she screams. Her face is turning red, and for a split second, I have a weird, fleeting flashback to holding her in my arms when she was a colicky infant, trying to calm her in the middle of the night so that Rob, who always had an important case that he had to rest up for, could sleep. Why did I let him do that to me? I don’t think I slept more than two hours at a stretch for the first three months, while he always seemed to get at least six hours of sleep. I shake my head and zero back in on my daughter.