Chapter Twelve
Griffin had, he hated to admit, always been good at playing a game of pretend.
He could remember it from early on: snippets of memory where he stacked Legos, made worlds for himself while a babysitter or day care provider ignored him, or while his mom fought much-needed sleep on the couch, occasionally rousing herself enough to praise him.
Later, when he met Michael, their days of play had been full of pretend: They were baseball heroes, hitting huge home runs; they were generals lining up armies; they were Jedis with lightsabers running on low batteries.
Once he got older—baseball mitts and toy soldiers and plastic swords too small for his grown-up hands, his growing-up brain—pretending had been a secret pathway for him, a way into the kind of problem-solving that would eventually end up changing his life.
What if I’m on the side of the road? he would think.
I’m on the side of the road, and two of my tires blew, and I only have one spare.
There’s no such thing as a cell phone on this day where I’m on the side of the road. There’s nowhere to walk.
He didn’t tell anyone that’s how he got his ideas. He didn’t want people—his teachers, his professors—to think everything was a game to him.
Later, when pretending really failed him—when he was lying in bed half-crazy, high and hurting and impossibly alive, telling himself desperately, Pretend it doesn’t hurt, pretend it didn’t happen, or pretend that it did and that you’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead—it became another thing about his life before that he thought he’d never return to.
But here he was. Five thirty in the morning on a Paris street.
Pretending.
The church, he pretended, was still a burned-out shell of itself, like he’d seen on the news over the last couple of years, still shored up with huge, spidery grafts of scaffolding, still strangely blackened in some places. He imagined it without its great Gothic spire, now newly rebuilt.
He pretended it was still in ruins. That no one would ever come back to fix it.
If that were true, he knew, he wouldn’t be able to stand this close to it; he knew it would be surrounded by barricades and warning signs and probably French policemen.
But that little hurdle was no match for his apparently still-skilled pretending brain.
It helped that Paris was so sleepy in the dawn hours.
He hadn’t passed even one cyclist or runner on his way here, no one trying to frantically squeeze in a half hour of fresh air before going to sit in a cramped cubicle all day.
The few people he had seen—a teenager ducking sheepishly through the glass door of a tiny bakery that beamed a U of gold light onto the street, an older woman clucking affectionately at a small dog, a man maybe Griffin’s own age blowing out a plume of smoke as he passed—seemed not to notice him, and that helped, too.
Because in this game of pretend, he wasn’t meant to be seen at all.
He was meant to be in one of those burned-out bell towers. A monster, hiding from the world below.
A monster who never came down long enough to say something as colossally, shortsightedly stupid as So you’ll look at me, then.
I live in there, he thought desperately, picturing it now. I sit on blackened beams of wood. I talk to sooty gargoyles who never talk back. I draw pictures in the ashes. I crouch on stone buttresses and watch Michael get married from way up high.
Layla Bailey doesn’t think to look at me.
“Look at you how?” she’d said to him last night, beneath the dome at that big department store unlike anyplace he’d ever seen, standing there in a sweater that he thought for sure was the right kind of soft, a pair of jeans that hugged her hips and hid the shape of her legs, her feet covered by the socks and shoes he’d thought to get for her.
He thought, How I feel like I’m always looking at you, ever since I first saw you.
Like I can’t help it.
Like you’re the only thing worth looking at.
But he said, “Like we’re friends.”
As these things went—these things being, he guessed, getting through a destination wedding with more than the usual messy dynamics—it wasn’t much of a plan.
But they’d hatched it haltingly on a long walk back to the hotel from the Galeries—two and a half miles, according to his phone, but she’d refused another rideshare, “Now that I have the sneakers,” and anyway, walking was good for him, a better alternative to tightening, painful stillness, especially if he was any kind of stressed.
And after that boat ride—after getting Layla Bailey off that boat ride, after he impulsively said, So you’ll look at me, then—he was fucking stressed.
“It makes sense, if you think about it,” he told her as they passed by another huge, ornate building, important enough to draw a well-dressed crowd around its front.
“The opera,” she said, by way of brief explanation, not looking twice. Her hand clutched tight around the thin rope of her shopping bag. “What makes sense?”
Did he take you to the opera here? he didn’t ask.
“That we’d, you know. Become friends. On a trip like this. Neither of us with dates. Neither of us, you know. Family.”
He noticed her jaw tighten at that.
“Rosie doesn’t have a date,” she finally said. “And she’s not family. You’re the best man, and she’s the maid of honor. If you think about it, that makes more sense. For being…friends.”
The pause there, it was speaking. A stutter over a different sort of idea.
I don’t want to play pretend with Rosie, he thought automatically.
“But Rosie isn’t the problem,” he said instead, and before she could do with that what he knew she’d been doing all night, what she’d been telling herself all night, what she’d tried to say to him back in the Galeries, when he knew, he knew she was thinking about leaving, he added, “We are.”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
He shrugged. “We’re the ones who know. About Emily and Michael.”
If she clocked that he hadn’t really answered her—that he wouldn’t admit to exploding out of his seat on that boat and dragging her off it, that doing that had felt like a very modest concession to his other idea, which was to throw her ex-husband over the edge of it, hopefully directly into the splash of his new girlfriend’s vomit—she didn’t say.
She said, “What do you propose?”
So now, here he was, Paris at dawn, pretending he hadn’t said any of it: that if Layla stuck close, if she made it seem like she was striking up a friendship with some stranger on this trip, if they paired off on whatever horrible forced-sightseeing outings they went on over the next few days, people would stop wondering if Layla was worrying about the ex.
“You won’t seem so alone,” he’d said at one point, and she practically exploded at him.
“There’s nothing wrong with being alone!”
There isn’t, he thought now, staring longingly up at one of those bell towers, his mind’s eye covering them in smoke damage again, making a home for himself and all his small, monstrous thoughts, the ones he had when he was most alone.
His phone blared a long, shrill ring.
“Fuck,” he muttered, shoving a hand into his pocket, pressing the button on the side so it would not, at least, disturb the peace out here any further. His game of pretend disastrously compromised, since he’d have no use for a fucking cell phone in a burned-out bell tower.
He was pretty sure who it was before he pulled it from his pocket. Despite his not actually living in a bell tower, very few people had his number, fewer ever called it. Even Michael usually texted first.
He had, in fact, finally exchanged numbers with Layla last night, what with the plan and all, but he had the feeling a pretend friend wouldn’t have cause to use it, at least not at this hour.
“Hey, Mom,” he said, when he confirmed his suspicion and swiped his finger across the screen.
“I knew you’d be up,” she said, in that way she had, no bullshit, no sugarcoating it.
“Out walking,” he said, though he hadn’t been walking for a while now. He was only standing here, staring up at this both old and new church, talking into his phone quietly like he was actually inside its sacred walls.
“Early there.”
“Late there,” he answered.
There was a stretch of silence on the line, or rather, his mother’s particular silence, which meant there was always something happening in the background: a gate being closed, a bucket being tossed, dishes being washed, something.
Six hours behind, he figured the faint clinking he heard was tea-making.
She still made some every night before bed, same as she had his whole life, even when she’d had to sleep during the days, accommodating whatever punishing shift she happened to be on.
His eyes drifted to the other bell tower, the one he hadn’t been looking at, and he pictured his wiry, hardy mother, brown-gray braid down her back, scrubbing its walls clean. Shouting out of one of her stone arches a few times a day, asking whether the monster across the way was up yet.
“You sleeping at all?” she asked eventually.
“A bit,” he said, which was not a lie. He’d actually slept last night, four hours at least, which was a good stretch for him. He had a dream, too, but not the sort he’d say anything about to his mother.
It had to do with that sweater Layla got.
That he got for her.
“What’s that?” she said.
“What?”
“You made a noise.”
“I didn’t.” Probably a lie. Anyway, if his mother said he made a noise, he’d made a noise. She missed nothing, not now. A monstrous curse he’d put on her without ever meaning to.
Right now, she was probably trying not to ask him a familiar question, the same one he got asked for months and months by doctors and nurses and therapists.
She still had to try, even though it’d been years since he’d yelled at her in a fit of frustrated exhaustion.
Please, stop. It’s never what you want to hear.
It’s never going to be what you want to hear, not ever again.