Chapter Eleven
As Piper hurried across the bridge toward Notre Dame, she spotted Nicolas sitting in front of the soaring church, and her heart did a little flip. He was there waiting for her, just like he said he would be. He stood as soon as she approached, a grin spreading across his face.
“I thought perhaps you would not come,” he said, giving her a kiss on each cheek. “I am glad you did.”
“Listen, I have to ask. This isn’t, like, a pity meetup, is it?”
“A pity meetup?” He looked confused. “What is that?”
“I mean, you’re a nice guy, but just because my life is falling apart doesn’t mean that you have to entertain me.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I don’t want to be anyone’s charity project.”
“Piper.” When she didn’t reply, he touched her chin gently and waited until she looked reluctantly back at him. “Piper, you are not a charity project.”
She looked into his green eyes, losing herself there for a second. “Are you sure?”
“Completely. Besides, I can practice my English with you, yes? It’s nice for me.”
“Oh, so I’m just a convenient conversation practice partner, then?” She tried not to feel a little disappointed.
“Piper, you are a conversation practice partner with the prettiest smile I’ve ever seen.
You are kind and interesting and you appreciate poetry and you like bookstores, and, well, I would like to know you better.
” He raised an eyebrow at her. “Now, shall we walk? Or is there more to this interrogation?”
She laughed. “Yeah, okay. We can walk.”
“Maybe you can tell me about your mom.”
“Really?”
Nicolas nodded. “If you’d like.”
“Yeah, okay,” Piper said, her pulse racing as she took a deep breath and began.
As they strolled around Notre Dame, looking up at the intricate statues that flanked the massive church, Nicolas listened as Piper haltingly poured out the story of her mother’s diagnosis and her fears for the future, and when she had finally finished speaking, he was still there, still beside her.
“Piper,” he said when she had finally gone quiet. “I am so very sorry that you will lose her.”
It was somehow exactly the right thing to say.
Her friends—who had dwindled in number when Piper stopped going out on weekends in college so that she could go home to her mother—said pat things such as It’s the circle of life and She’ll always be looking down on you, which was perhaps true, but which didn’t help.
She needed someone to look her in the eye and to see how much she was hurting and to acknowledge that it was terrible and unfair and that there was nothing any of them could do about it.
“I’m sorry you lost your dad, too,” Piper said.
“I know I should be looking at the bright side and all that and saying how lucky I am to have had her for the time I’ve had her. ”
He tilted his head to the side and searched her eyes. “No, I don’t think you should be saying that right now, Piper,” he said. “I think you are saying just the right things.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Will you tell me about your dad?” Piper asked.
Nicolas was silent for a few seconds, and then he took her hand, leading her back toward the square in front of Notre Dame, which they had circled entirely as they’d talked, weaving in and out of lines of tourists waiting to enter the cathedral.
“He was from New York, and he met my mother when he was on a business trip here in the late 1990s. He moved here for her and never looked back; he fell in love with the city, meter by meter, and he taught me to love it, too, from the time I was old enough to walk.”
“That’s beautiful.”
“When I was a boy, my papa used to take me here, to the ?le de la Cité every weekend. We would start at Point Zéro. Do you know what this is?”
Piper shook her head, and Nicolas smiled at her, stopped walking, and pointed down.
She was startled to realize that they were standing on a cobblestone formation that was different from the others.
She blinked and looked more carefully, taking in the eight-pointed bronze star at the center, surrounded by four stones that together read POINT ZéRO DES ROUTES DE FRANCE.
“This is the starting point of every major road leaving Paris,” Nicolas explained with a smile. “The center of the city. Every week, my father would have me stand on this star, and he’d tell me that we could go anywhere from there, and that each direction was a new adventure.”
“I love that,” Piper said, looking up at him.
“I loved it, too. And he was right. We would set off at random, and we never took the same walk twice. There’s so much to discover in this city, Piper, so much to discover in this world.
My father always told me that there may be sadness in life, but there’s always joy, too, right around the corner.
You just have to keep walking until you find it. ”
Piper blinked, the words hitting home as they began to walk away from the bronze star. “How did you lose him?”
“A heart attack,” Nicolas said bluntly. “In some ways, I think, the opposite of what you are going through. He was here one day—taking me for strolls around Paris—and then gone the next, in the middle of playing tennis, with no chance to say goodbye.”
“I’m so sorry.” It made her ache to think of her mother disappearing with no warning. Maybe in a way, as difficult as this time was for both of them, it was a blessing to have these moments together, knowing what was to come.
“Thanks.” He glanced down at her. “He and my mother raised me with French as my primary language—my dad spoke fluently—but after he was gone, I always felt like the fact that I didn’t really know his language, his culture, meant that I’d missed out on knowing him as well as I could have.”
“And that’s why you’re reading American poets now?”
“My dad liked poetry, too, but I was too young when he died; that was never something he really shared with me.”
“I bet he’d be proud to hear you quoting Whitman.”
“I hope so.” They were approaching the Pont Neuf, and Piper assumed when they got there that they’d turn left and head back over to the Latin Quarter.
But instead, Nicolas led her across the street, past a statue of a king on horseback, and down a set of steep stairs into a wedge of land that narrowed to a point at the island’s end, jutting into the Seine.
“The Saule Pleureur de la Pointe,” Nicolas said, gesturing ahead, to where a tree the size of a house drooped its leaves toward the water at the end of the island.
“The weeping willow of the point. I sometimes take my lunch here before I go in for an afternoon shift. There’s something wonderful about simply being still and letting the world go by. Shall we?”
Nicolas led Piper to the stone wall just in front of the willow, and they sat at the water’s edge, their feet dangling as the Seine streamed by them. Nicolas closed his eyes and breathed in. “My favorite spot in Paris.”
Piper could see why; she felt like part of the city itself as the world bustled around her, with boats sliding up and down the river and people on the Left Bank hurrying back and forth, lost in their own conversations.
Nicolas opened his eyes and stared out at the Seine and then glanced up at the sky, where white, puffy clouds hung overhead.
“Every time I walk through this city, every time I discover something new, every time I remember to leave space for things that surprise me, my father’s right here with me, even after all these years.
I walk with his memory. I guess that’s what I wanted to tell you, Piper.
We never have enough time, in the end, with the people we love, do we?
But your mother will be with you always, the way my father is with me. ”
“That’s not enough, though, is it?” Piper said.
“I know it sounds greedy, but I don’t want to walk with her memory.
I want to walk with her. I want her to be there at my wedding and when I have children of my own and when I need a shoulder to cry on.
I want to watch her grow old. Why don’t I get to have that?
” These felt like selfish thoughts—Piper was making her mom’s death about her—but she couldn’t shake them.
Losing her mom would reshape her entire world.
“Nothing can change the sense of loss you’ll feel when she goes,” Nicolas said after a while. “But you still have her for now, Piper. What will you do with that time?”
Piper understood that this was a question that most people asked of themselves too late.
We take the moments for granted until we realize that time is running out.
“Well, we’re here in Paris together now.
That’s something we always dreamed of doing.
And I’m taking her to see Jackson Quick in concert on Friday.
He’s her favorite singer from when she was young.
I’m just afraid that when this week is over, it will be the beginning of the end, you know? ”
“So we will do our best to make it memorable for both of you, yes?”
“ ‘We’?” Piper echoed.
“It would be my honor to help. Now, what do you say we grab a coffee before I have to be back at work?” He stood and offered her his hand. She took it, and after he helped her up, he didn’t let go, and she realized she didn’t want him to.
They began to talk again as they strolled back toward the Pont Neuf, leaving behind the shade of the great willow and the quiet peace of the magical park as they made their way back to the real world.
The Jackson Quick concert was sold out, which complicated things for Henry.
Not that Henry wasn’t happy for the kid. Or, well, Jackson Quick wasn’t exactly a kid anymore, was he? When he had recorded “City of Light” all those years ago, he’d been a fresh-faced twentysomething, but he’d be in his fifties by now, wouldn’t he?
My, the years went by fast. Faster still when you got to Henry’s age.