Chapter Four #2
It still didn’t feel real. And here they were in Paris, and her mother was yawning and trying hard to keep her eyes open, and Piper couldn’t help but feel she was already losing her, bit by bit, even though she was still here.
“Mom,” she said now as they walked back to their hotel after their meal at Café Le Petit Pont. “I know you need to sleep, but I don’t want to do anything without you. I’m just going to stay in and read a book or something while you nap, okay?”
“That is most certainly not okay,” her mom replied. “This is your very first time in Paris, and you’re not wasting it holed up in a hotel room with me. Look, I just need to recharge my battery tonight, and then I’ll be ready to hit the ground running tomorrow.”
“Are you sure?” Piper asked, a familiar wave of guilt washing over her.
“Honey, I’ll be mad at you if you don’t go out and see a bit of the city.”
“Yeah, all right. I’ll just stick around this neighborhood, though, okay? I’ll save the Eiffel Tower and everything for when you can go with me.”
“If I were you, I’d go back to the café and strike up a conversation with that cute waiter,” her mom said, grinning at her.
“It wouldn’t be nearly as fun without you there to humiliate me.”
Her mom laughed. “Look, honey, I know I push sometimes. But when you’re young, you have to seize the opportunities that come along, or you’ll have regrets. Believe me, I know.”
Piper didn’t say anything for a moment as they crossed the bustling Place Saint-Michel and turned down a much quieter side street. “Do you have regrets, Mom?” she asked quietly as they reached their hotel, a few doors down on the left.
Her mom paused at the hotel’s door. “A million of them, sweetie.” She looked Piper right in the eye and added firmly, “But not a single one of them has to do with you. I am the luckiest woman in the world to have a daughter like you.”
“And I’m the luckiest daughter,” Piper said.
“No, you’re not,” her mom said as she pulled the hotel’s door open. Her voice trembled as she added, “The luckiest daughter would get to have her mother until she was an old woman herself.”
Piper nodded, too choked up to reply right away. She waited until they were in the small elevator, heading up to their room on the third floor, before saying, “I’m still the luckiest. To have had you for the time I’ve had.”
Her mom reached out to gently touch Piper’s cheek. “I feel the same way, my love. I wouldn’t trade a second of it.” She yawned, looking exhausted.
“Mom?” Piper ventured. “You sure you don’t want me to stay with you?”
“Go, honey,” her mother said firmly. “Explore Paris. Check out Notre Dame or Sainte-Chapelle or something.” They had reached their hotel room door, and her mother used the tasseled hotel key to open it, turning the lock twice counterclockwise and turning the knob.
“I mean it. Stop worrying about me. Go have fun, get a nice dinner somewhere, and we’ll have a great day tomorrow, okay?
” She didn’t wait for a response. She gave Piper a small smile, then handed her the key, which was to be left at the front desk whenever they went out, and slipped inside, pulling the door pointedly closed behind her.
Piper hesitated, frozen in place. She could follow her in, but she knew her mother needed her rest. After a moment, she sighed in resignation and pulled out her phone.
She’d been dying to visit Shakespeare and Company, the English-language bookstore near the hotel, because she loved the story of its welcoming approach to visitors: penniless aspiring writers had long been allowed to sleep in the store overnight in exchange for promising that they’d read a book a day, help in the shop, and write a one-page autobiography before they left.
Tumbleweeds, they were called—and Piper liked the idea of being blown in by the wind and finding a sort-of home before one had figured life out.
It was comforting to think that there was a place for people like her, who were still in the process of becoming who they were.
Taking a deep breath, she pulled up walking directions to the bookstore. It was only six minutes away, back in the direction from which she and her mother had just come.
As she exited the hotel and crossed through the bustling Place Saint-Michel, she wiped at her eyes. At least her mom wasn’t around now to see her come undone.
She knew that her mom was sicker than she was letting on.
She could see it in the way she moved, the way that she winced with the effort of standing up or sitting down, the way that she lost her breath so easily these days, sometimes trailing off in the middle of a sentence because her lungs couldn’t keep up anymore.
Piper also knew that her mother wanted badly to convince her that everything was normal.
But things hadn’t been normal since the day her mother had called, just over two years ago, and said the dreaded words, “Honey, I have cancer.”
The Café Le Petit Pont loomed just ahead to the right, and Piper hurried past it, glancing inside to look for the cute waiter and then looking quickly away just in case he spotted her. She was still mortified by the way her mother had acted in front of him.
When she had safely cleared the café, she looked up and was surprised to see that she was already standing in front of Shakespeare and Company.
She hadn’t realized that they’d been so close to it earlier.
The front of the store was green, with yellow signage and lettering, quotes written on chalkboards, and a square, black-and-white image of Walt Whitman on the wall to the right, surrounded by a quote in French.
She’d expected a line outside the famous store, but there wasn’t one, so she approached the front door and went in.
She drew in a deep breath the moment she walked through the first narrow doorway inside, over a small step that was painted with the words LIVE FOR HUMANITY.
There were books as far as the eye could see, stuffed onto shelves, lining every wall, all the way up to the ceiling.
The managed chaos was utterly beautiful, and Piper stopped for a moment and just inhaled, the scent of spines and pages and ink all blurring together into one perfect perfume of print.
She headed toward the back of the store, and then made her way up the narrow staircase, reading the words painted on the stairs as she climbed: I WISH I COULD SHOW YOU, WHEN YOU ARE LONELY OR IN DARKNESS, THE ASTONISHING LIGHT OF YOUR OWN BEING.
It was a quote from Hafiz, and it touched her to the core.
As she wandered through tiny, book-lined rooms upstairs, her gaze landed on a sign—BE NOT INHOSPITABLE TO STRANGERS LEST THEY BE ANGELS IN DISGUISE.
Her heart did a little flip of recognition as she stared up at it.
She’d read the phrase before; it had been the mantra of the store’s founder, George Whitman, who’d attributed it to Yeats.
But today, standing inside this store an ocean away from home, knowing that soon her mother would be gone and she’d be adrift in the world, looking for a place to call her own, the words felt like they’d been written just for her, a stranger in an unfamiliar land, facing an unknowable future.
“Piper?” A deep voice cut into her thoughts, and she looked down from the sign only to realize, with a start, that the cute waiter from Café Le Petit Pont was standing in front of her, clutching a narrow book in his hand.
“Nicolas?” she managed to choke out. She could feel her cheeks heating up, her pulse beginning to race. “Uh, what are you doing here?”
“I’m on my lunch break.”
“I mean… in an English language bookstore.” She had figured a place like this was mostly for tourists.
“Oh.” He smiled at her. “Don’t let my French accent fool you; my dad was an American.
I grew up speaking English, but I’ve let myself get rusty.
” He held up the book in his hand and shrugged, a bit of color rising to his own cheeks.
“Perhaps it’s silly, but I’ve been trying to improve by reading poetry. ”
“Poetry?”
He looked her in the eye. “It’s just, I think you can’t really speak a language with fluency until you fall in love with it, can you? And how better to fall in love than to know the most lyrical way the language’s words can be used?”
“That’s… beautiful,” she said, feeling a bit like the wind had been knocked out of her.
“I just wish I spoke better.” He shrugged, looking embarrassed.
“You speak wonderfully. Really, you do.” She glanced at the title of the book he was holding and looked back up at him. “Leaves of Grass?”
“You know it?”
“Well… Yeah. Walt Whitman is my favorite poet.”
Nicolas’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “You like poetry, too?”
“I wrote my college thesis on American poets of the nineteenth century.” She glanced down at the book in his hands. “Have you read Whitman before?”
“Have I read Whitman?” He grinned. “ ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, and the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.’ ” He hesitated. “Did I get it right? It was one of my father’s favorites.”
Piper nodded, at a loss for words, because Whitman’s famous poem—an elegy for Abraham Lincoln, after his death—always made her think of people being gone too soon, in the wrong seasons of their lives, and of course that made her think of her mother, and suddenly, surrounded by books and wisdom and looking into the eyes of the most attractive guy she’d ever met, she felt tears forming, and oh, my gosh, was she actually about to cry?
“Piper?” Nicolas asked with concern. “Are you all right?”
But she wasn’t all right at all—she hadn’t been in two years—and even with the solace of being surrounded by books, she could feel the familiar swell of grief rolling in, and she had to get out.
“Uh, excuse me,” she managed to say, turning and dashing down the stairs and out of the store before he could see her burst into tears.