Twenty-One
TWENTY-ONE
THE THING ABOUT a cockamamie last-minute flight to New York from the Caucasus is that you end up with an eight-hour layover, and even if that layover is in Paris it’s a bit of a nightmare if all you really want to do is go home.
Which Amy decided she did. She could imagine the apartment, what it would look like even if the housekeeper had come, Judd always messed it up as soon as Nadia left, a trail of dirty socks, nobody would change the cat litter (she could never ask Nadia to change the cat litter).
And Judd had probably been eating all his meals at the restaurant or at the halal cart on St. Mark’s, which meant that there was nothing in the fridge.
And probably a pile of laundry, plus her own laundry, and whatever Uno needed in the hospital. If she still needed anything.
She wondered who was coordinating Uno’s care.
Was it the boyfriend in from Singapore? Or was it Judd?
She imagined she’d take it over as soon as she got home; she was probably still listed on some of Uno’s paperwork.
She had always taken care of the details, figuring out how to get the billing charged to Uno’s accounts, or to get reimbursed from Uno’s trust, how to hire someone to take her to meetings after her release, that one time she found a permanent caregiver.
Amy wandered through the long, glass-enclosed hallways of Charles de Gaulle and thought about how nervous she’d felt in this very place one week ago.
How ambitious. And also how, that time, she’d been trapped in the airport, but this time she had a long enough layover to go into the city, so at least that was something?
She boarded the train from the Charles de Gaulle platform and watched as the stops clicked by toward the city until Sacré-C?ur appeared in the distance on top of its glorious hill.
All those years ago, the first time Judd had cheated—she’d thought that maybe she’d live here once. A studio, a one-bedroom, near a florist and a bookseller.
Well, maybe in life number three.
She got off the train at Luxembourg Gardens and stood for a moment, agog at the orderliness of the street, the bourgeois peace of the place.
Restaurants on the corners, a shop selling macarons, a shop selling adorable brightly-colored children’s clothing.
Bustling shoppers, aimless tourists. She took a seat at a café with a striped awning and black-aproned waiters and couldn’t believe this city existed exactly like it did in every movie.
It had been—how long?—ten years at least since she’d been here, but she remembered it all as though it had been yesterday.
Nothing here really changed. Nothing here needed to change.
She stretched out her legs under the table; she was wearing gray jeans, black sneakers, felt grungy next to all these glamorous women.
It really was the best-dressed city in the world.
None of the teenagers here were goths; they’d done that twenty years ago.
Now they all wore wide-legged jeans and striped tops.
She had taken out twenty euros at the airport; it was all she had left.
“Madame,” said a waiter.
“Q’ava, madloba,” she said, and the waiter looked at her; she wasn’t making sense. “Un café,” and the waiter smiled faintly and turned away. She knew he didn’t speak Georgian. She just didn’t want to lose the sound of it.
The waiter brought her coffee, a tiny cup, a tiny square of chocolate on its saucer.
The weather was beautiful, springtime. She was two thousand miles from Tbilisi and twice as far from home.
She closed her eyes to see if she could still feel the thread that connected her to Andrei.
To her surprise, it was right there, humming inside her.
She sipped her coffee, nibbled her chocolate.
She wondered how long she would be able to feel the hum inside herself.
She wondered if there was a way to make it stay forever.
But lunchtime was coming and it was clear the waiter wanted her to surrender her seat for more profitable customers, so after an hour or so with her coffee she got up and crossed the street toward Luxembourg Gardens.
The garden, surrounded by tall black gates, was filled with green pavilions and stately tennis courts, statues and neatly mowed lawns.
The only dogs here were on leashes. The only stray animals were the beautiful strange banded pigeons of Paris and the frisky, oversized squirrels.
She found a path toward the small pond in the middle of the park where the children still played with small toy sailboats, took a seat in a green chair and watched the children push their boats around from the sides of the pond with their long sticks.
It was already one in the afternoon. Soon she’d have to return to the airport to finally make it home.
She was out of money, she was out of time.
The children by the pond were giggling, chasing each other, the only sounds in an otherwise strangely quiet park. She remembered when Ferry was like this, big-bellied, running around in his little shorts. His soft blond hair.
She called Judd. “I made it to Paris. I’m sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens.”
“Thank God,” he said. “You’re out of there.”
And immediately she was angry. “What do you mean? Out of where?”
“Ame, every day you were in Georgia I was worried,” he said. “I was following what was happening there on the news. Did you know they were having massive protests while you were there? Right downtown or something?”
A squirrel dashed between the green chairs to grab the remains of a tourist’s croissant. “Huh,” she said.
“That wasn’t anywhere near where you were, right?”
“What, the protests?”
“I mean, it was far away from wherever you were staying?”
She thought of the video she had on her phone, how satisfying it would be to send it to him. But instead, she just took a breath. “Yes,” she said. “Far away.”
“I don’t know, these lunatics can’t get their act together anywhere in Eastern Europe. It’s like, Jesus Christ, people. It’s 2023, figure your fucking government out.”
“That’s what they’re trying to do.”
“Yeah, but—”
“They’re trying to figure their government out. They want to be free. That’s what they’re fighting for.”
“Okay, fine, I’m just saying you don’t need to—”
“Their word for it is tavisupleba. It means ‘self-rule.’ Like you get to be the lord of yourself. It’s what they’ve been struggling for for centuries.”
Judd made a hmph noise. “Okay.”
“Tavisupleba,” Amy said. “It’s a beautiful word.”
“They can fight for their freedom after my wife gets home, all right?”
“Judd, if you don’t think about the future, what else is there to think about?”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw a dog without a leash. The dog was sleek, black, probably cared for. Certainly it had an owner somewhere.
“What does that mean?”
“How’s Uno?”
“It’s a fucking mess,” he said. “I’ve been trying to organize everything—you know her crazy family insurance thing, when you get home I’m going to need you to unravel the way her plan works.
The hospital has already started billing her.
And I’m afraid we’re going to be on the hook since her brother won’t talk to her anymore, and I think we’re her guarantor? ”
“You have the money,” she said, mildly.
“It’s like hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“You have the money.”
Judd barked a laugh. “So I told her fucking brother, I told him what’s going on, and he won’t give me a straight answer about whether or not he’ll help. And nobody else seems to know what to do about the insurance. But her brother always liked you, right?”
“I never met her brother,” Amy said.
“Didn’t you?”
The dog was loping its way around the pond. Nobody was following it.
“No,” she said. “I never did.”
“Then how did you figure out what to do with her insurance?”
“I made a lot of phone calls,” Amy said.
“Hmm,” said Judd. And the more she watched it, the more it seemed that the dog didn’t belong to any human, and in fact maybe it wasn’t so well cared for?
Because now that she was watching it, she was almost certain she could detect a slight limp.
“You know, I found your credit cards in Ferry’s desk. ”
“Why were you looking through his desk?”
“Why would you go to a foreign country and not bring any credit cards?”
“I didn’t—” She couldn’t remember what she was thinking, only that she needed to be free. “I can’t remember.”
Judd let this inanity pass. “Well, you’ll be home soon. When do you have to get back to the airport?”
She looked at her watch. Her flight was in a little more than two hours, and the lines in Charles de Gaulle were dismaying, interminable. “Is she comfortable?”
“Uno?”
“Yes, is she—is she in distress?”
“She seems stable right now,” Judd said. “I mean, I think we’re on a downhill slide but you’ll probably be back in time to see her alive.”
“She’s not in pain?”
“No.”
“Is she conscious?”
“Most of the time, no,” Judd said.
“And Ferry’s okay?”
“I think so.”
“Is he still angry?”
“Sure,” Judd said. “But he’s working through it. He’s gonna be okay.”
“I love that boy,” Amy said.
“I know you do. We all do.”
The dog was circling back toward Amy. “Pssst, psst,” she said. The dog approached; it definitely had a limp. She pulled a pig’s ear out of her backpack. “Hey,” she said. “Hey, for you.”
The dog took it gratefully, and instead of running away with his prize, he lay down on his belly and began gently nibbling.
Amy resisted the urge to pat his head, not wanting to disturb him while he was eating. Now that she was on her way home, now that whatever had happened with Meret was almost certainly in the rearview mirror, things would be the way they’d always been.
“Who are you talking to?”
“There’s a dog,” she said.
“God, Amy, it’s enough already. Another dog?”
“Yes,” she said.
“It’s time to come home.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Amy?”
“I haven’t figured it out yet, Judd. I still don’t think I’ve figured it out.”
“Figured out what?” Judd said.
But she wasn’t sure she could explain herself without getting tangled up in the words. So she stayed quiet. Tavisupleba, tavisupleba.
“I love you, Amy,” he finally said.
“I love you too,” she said.
And then she hung up the phone.
And when the dog finished his pig’s ear and began to trot away in a new direction, Amy followed him through the garden.
They passed statues, they passed pigeons, they passed the gates, and soon enough they were in the streets of Paris.
The dog paused at the streetlight. It knew how to cross the street.
It knew! The traffic stopped for the dog, and Amy followed.
She had a leash in her backpack, but no collar, but she could make the leash into a slipknot if she could just catch him. He walked quickly toward the end of the broad street, in the shadow of tall limestone buildings. “Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! S’il vous pla?t.” The dog kept moving. “Gtkhovt!”
And he stopped and looked at her, quizzically, one canine eyebrow raised higher than the other. As if to say, are you coming?
She was coming. She was almost there.
“Wait for me!” she said. Angelozi , angel, wait for me! But before she could arrive, the dog disappeared around a corner. Amy hurried to catch him, graceful down the sidewalk, tying an invisible thread to wherever the dog might have gone.