I’d first left Paris a few weeks shy of my 23rd birthday and never looked back. That second part usually elicits a look of surprise from my more romantic American peers, for whom Paris has remained a bucket-list item they’ve never quite gotten around to checking off. But, to me, the Haussmanian facades had nothing left to give. Sure, I’ve returned a handful of times in the last decade, mostly for the holidays or to woo a long-term boyfriend or two, but it never feels the same as it used to, though I suppose nothing ever feels the way it did when you were 17.
I check into my hotel at three on the dot, a small place in the Latin Quarter. I desperately want to sleep, and almost do, but I’ve traveled enough to know better. Instead, I leave my bags on the floor and head out for a walk, or maybe just a coffee and a Marlboro or two. The sunlight will do me good after fifteen straight hours of enclosed spaces, and I can’t remember the last time I took a stroll for the sake of it. The funeral kept me too busy last time I was in town, and Paris is the only place where I ever feel like I can take a break. It has that effect on you.
The apartment I lived in while at school was a ten-minute metro ride away from where I’m now standing, and my school was within walking distance. I’ve probably smoked a cigarette at this very crosswalk. As I walk past a cafe with a black awning, among the twentysomethings sharing pints and plates of fries, I can almost see him. Me. A younger, scruffier, more idealistic Thibault. 21, maybe 22, who smokes roll-ups out of the window of his 20-square-meter studio and who covers the walls in biology notes. Thibault, who doesn’t yet know that he’s about to be hired at a lab halfway across the world, who’ll be so excited that he’ll forget to tell his parents, whose mother will cry and say they’re tears of joy but he’ll know better. That same kid—because I was, after all, a kid, who had never had to fill out H-1B paperwork and kept everything in a checking account and never separated whites from colors, no matter how hard I tried to hide it—could be any one of the bright-eyed students who sit before me. I wonder how many of them are itching to get out, and how many of them know that they are right where they’re supposed to be.
I decide to keep walking, I’ll get a coffee somewhere else. If I stop there, I’ll sit in the same spot, order the same drink, trip and find myself in some faded, ripped-up, dog-eared vignette of a memory. Instead, I end up at a terrasse by the riverbank, face to face with the very same bouquinistes where I used to buy prints and postcards and scuffed-up copies of Baudelaire. I know that beyond the dark green booths, just on the other side of the wall, a 19-year-old Thibault drinks rosé over drawings of molecules while he and his friends hang their legs over the Seine. That Thibault can’t wait to get out of this place, away from the same acquaintances he’s had since grade school, away from his mother constantly asking if he’s got enough to eat. He’s never boarded a plane with a single tupperware of her food, never had to deal with being in a country where he doesn’t know a soul. He doesn’t know that he will lose sight of those friends before he reaches 25.
I nurse an allongé and check my phone. Three messages from Pauline, all asking if I landed safely. She gets the anxiety from our mother, and I get our father’s lack thereof. I tell her that yes, I’ve landed safely; yes, I’ve checked into a hotel; yes, I’ll be headed over soon. She’s been a wreck since the funeral, my younger sister shouldn’t be worrying about me at all. I can already picture her at her desk down in Lyon, trying to find a train to bring her up tonight, rather than waiting until the morning like we’d planned. I reassure her a few more times while I finish my drink, until she tells me that she needs to get back to work. I don’t mind, my cup is empty and three butts have appeared in the ashtray next to it. I should get going anyway.
The metro stop is just a few streets away, but I don’t take the metro. Instead, I walk across the Pont Neuf towards Les Halles, stopping in the middle to look at the Seine. A bateau-mouche passes by and tourists wave at me. I don’t feel like waving back, but my arm moves without my realizing it. It’s still an instinct after all this time, even if I never bother to wave when I’m back at home. There is something special about this wave, about how the very same Parisians who huff and scowl and complain all the time are willing to do such a ridiculous gesture purely for the smile of some people we’d otherwise groan about. I shouldn’t still consider myself one of them, but I do. The city feels years away, but a part of me never quite left.
It’s late spring. You can tell by the color of the trees and the pre-tourist season hum, when the streets buzz with excitement before the French flee the city. Right now, it’s only ours. My mother passed away in the winter, it was so much gloomier then. The clouds were thick and gray and rain came down all week. The sky has cleared by now. At the time, it felt as though it never would.
I haven’t taken this train in a while. The cars are still the same as when I rode it every Saturday, with a week’s worth of laundry in my bag. The seats are indented by decades of sweaty backs, and scratched graffiti decorates the salmon panels overhead. The floor is still mud-stained from last week’s weather. I sit facing the traffic and sink into the same dread I felt when I was a teenager, when returning home after a day out meant returning to rules and parents and schoolwork. Our moms would say be home by ten and at nine-thirty, my friends and I would be running towards the platform and slipping in just as the doors closed. We always missed curfew and we never minded. We’d get in trouble, then start again the next weekend. What I wouldn’t give to get in trouble for missing curfew one more time.
Saint-Germain-en-Laye is the end of the line, nineteen miles from Paris, a mere thirty minutes from Chatelet on the RER A. The birthplace of Louis XIV, Claude Debussy, and me and Pauline, in that order. During school, before we were old enough to take the train into the city on our own, my friends and I would spend afternoons in the castle gardens with nothing but each other and Haribo to keep us company. I exit the station and turn right, away from the castle and the bus stops and the commotion of the busy streets, filled with kids whose childhoods were no doubt identical to mine. The storefronts become preschools become apartments become houses, 18th-century numbers with cream-colored facades and painted shutters.
“Thibault?” A man who has just stepped out of his front door is squinting at me. “Thibault Andrieu, is that you?” he asks, in a French I feel I haven’t heard in years. His hairline and glasses age him greatly, but the voice holds a familiar youthfulness. He smiles, and for a moment, he seems just as young as he sounds. “Hector Leroux, Terminale S.”
“Oh, Hector, how’ve you been?” I try to shake his hand but he goes in for a bise and I have no choice but to oblige. We may never have been close friends, but Hector and I shared enough Bunsen burners to form some semblance of a bond.
“I’m great! Hey, I heard you’d moved to the States. Are you back for good?”
I shake my head. “Family stuff, you know how it is.”
He laughs. “My wife and I just moved back for the little ones, we’d been in Paris all this time. But, you know, I figured it would be good for them to grow up closer to their grandparents.” I’ve heard as much from most of my high school friends. Married, kids on the way, upgrading from their starter homes. If I’d stayed, maybe I would’ve ended up like them, instead of going through breakup after breakup with guys who couldn’t understand that the lab would always have to come first. “Hey, how are your parents? Is your dad still in…where was it, Marseille?”
I don’t know why this catches me off guard. It shouldn’t. It’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask, when all I did back then was complain about them. “He moved to Cannes when he retired. My mom’s house is still here though, so I come back when I can.”
“How is your mother?”
I know that I should tell him. The words are so easy to say: she died four months ago. Five words, any number of euphemisms to choose from, but I don’t choose any. “She’s waiting for me,” is what I say instead.
An indiscernible look washes over his face, but disappears as quickly as it came. “Say hi to her for me, will you? How long are you in town for? We should catch up, do I still have you on Facebook?”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Well I should get going too, I have to pick the kids up, anyway. See you around, alright?”
“Yeah, I’ll see you.”
And I keep walking.
Mom’s house, or rather the house that Pauline and I now share ownership of, was a narrow three-storey millstone built at the edge of the forest. The hedge is overgrown, but her flowers are in full bloom. These details don’t matter, but I notice them anyway. I take note of the overflowing mailbox and the empty birdfeeder. I take note of the olive tree next to the front gate. Its leaves were gone when I last came, but even without her, it grew back. I take note of this as I sit on the front steps and light a cigarette. I hear my mom scold me for smoking so close to her house, and guilt sprouts in the pit of my stomach, but it doesn’t stop me from smoking another. Our old swingset creaks in the backyard, gently rocked by the brisk Spring breeze, and I can almost hear my sister, five years old, her hair chopped right under her chin, squealing along with it. Plus haut, she cries, until her voice is lifted away by cherry blossoms and bumblebees. My cigarette goes out and I take it as a sign to go inside, no matter how little I want to.
There’s a stillness in the house that I’ve never felt before. There is no trickle of the boiler or hum of the oven or purring of Myrtille. There is no waft of incense or olive oil. I don’t trip over shopping bags or shoes. A thin layer of dust coats the picture frames that have been hanging for the last twenty years. Even in the dark, I can tell that much. I thought it would be harder not to fall into my habits of leaving my keys by the front door, of flicking every light on, of leaving a trail of belongings throughout the house, but it’s like I’m unable to make myself comfortable. Though my face may decorate nearly every wall, the house itself may as well be a stranger’s.
I open the blinds and open the windows. I let out some staleness and let in fresh air. I find the fusebox and turn the electricity back on. Mostly for Pauline’s sake, so that she won’t be forced to brave the same stillness as I am, but partly for myself as well. It is only then, once the lights have come on and the flatscreen has started buzzing and the clock radio blinks 00:00, that I allow myself to hang my jacket among my mom’s winter coats and sit down on a couch that has finally forgotten the shape of my thighs. What now?
I blink and an hour has passed. I hadn’t realized how tired I was, though jetlag creeps up on you like that. In a daze, I peel myself off the couch and float from room to room, opening drawers of discarded bills and cabinets of years-old china, looking for nothing in particular. The postcard-plastered fridge is empty, the dishwasher is too. I meander up the stairs, run my fingers along the cracks in the banister, remember the creak of each step, and stop in the middle of the hall. Mom’s bedroom door is ajar, the bathroom’s is, too. Mine and Pauline’s are shut. I have a juvenile desire to enter my sister’s room, to pick souvenirs up from her shelves, to dig under her bed for letters and journals and secrets, but I don’t. It is her time capsule to open, I have my own.
My bedroom is exactly how I left it four months back and two Christmases ago and before I moved. The same blue-painted walls, with their Christian Bale movie posters and the map outlining countries I’d dreamed of seeing and have since seen. The same desk, a black and white Ikea two-piece still scuffed-up with pen marks, where my old fencing trophies and baccalaureate results have sat, untouched, since they first passed my hands. On the bookshelf, also Ikea, Stephen King, Victor Hugo, snow globes. Somewhere, hidden among the sweaters in the closet or the sports gear under the bed, a 15-year-old Thibault still inhabits this room. He sips on stale shoebox vodka and flips through SeriesTV Magazine. He skips through albums on his iPod and counts the days until he can crack open his Durex box, the one he so presumptuously bought after discovering François Ozon’s films at the library, the same box that’s still wrapped in plastic film ten years past its expiration date. Thibault is waiting for his mother to call him for dinner. He’ll be waiting a while.
I’ve taken my shirt off and tossed it onto the bed next to a stuffed dolphin I’d won at the Fête des Loges the summer before high school. Part of me knows that I should be heading back into Paris soon, where I have a hotel room and a phone charger and a work computer. But I’ve slithered into a moth-holed crewneck and my bed is made and I can’t be bothered with the trains, so I flip through photo albums instead, warm-toned, high-contrast snapshots of parties and school trips and family vacations. My friends and I in line at Parc Astérix, our parents drinking wine in Cassis, Pauline’s toothless grin while a paper Epiphany crown sits on her head. Half of the pictures I’ve labeled myself, the others are in my mother’s hand. Rounded letters from her schoolteacher days, cursive Ms and dotted Is. The names of childhood friends and neighborhood faces that I’ve forgotten but that my mother never did.
Half a box of penne and a jar of sauce later, the kitchen fan whirrs and the house smells like home again. I’ve brought my mom’s apricot jam up from the basement for breakfast, and cracked into a bottle of wine I’m pretty sure I gave her many birthdays ago. I text Pauline for last-minute details about her arrival, send her an awful picture I found of her when she was 13, remind her to bring the good vacuum and a bag of coussins de Lyon. I rinse my plate and fill the dishwasher. I leave my glass on the counter out of habit and return upstairs. My eyelids feel heavy and I can hardly stand up, but once I’m finally in bed, something still feels off.
My joggers are too tight and my pillow is too stiff and my room smells too clean. My favorite sheets don’t feel the way they used to. Pauline isn’t on the phone and Mom doesn’t pace the hall. The cat’s padded footsteps don’t make the floorboards creak. The sliver of sky from my curtain turns from deep to dark blue, and I toss and I turn until I can’t take it anymore. For the first time all day, I do what I’ve been avoiding, leave my bed, and push open my mother’s door.
It still smells like her. I don’t know how, nothing else in this house does. Maybe, somehow, she knew I was coming. I shut the door behind me and bury my nose in her dressing gown, closing my eyes as my fingers clutch the terrycloth. Lavender, Petit Marseillais shower gel, just a splash of eau de toilette. I take the robe off its hook and slip it on, letting Mom’s sleeves wrap around me just like they did when I was five and still dripping from the bath. In the dark, I find the foot of the bed and let myself fall face-first into the covers, their cotton soft against my cheeks. Before I know it, my head is on a pillow, I’ve brought my knees up to my chest, and everything smells of Mom’s detergent. Eight-year-old Thibault has just had another nightmare, and he woke up crying in the middle of the night. His father’s away again and his sister is fast asleep. His tears soak his mother’s favorite sheets while she runs her fingers through his hair and sings “La Bohème.” He wishes he could just stay there forever.
Tomorrow, there’ll be Pauline. There’ll be vacuuming and there’ll be itemizing. There’ll be music and cardboard boxes and a donation pile and we’ll laugh and share drinks and she’ll cry. But for tonight, there’s only me, my mother’s dressing gown, and tear-soaked bedsheets while I hum Aznavour.