Running Back Page 21

  The model house was tucked away, down two quiet streets, through a gate and a private garden. The gate pushed open, though it looked like it was supposed to be latched, and we walked past potted plants and into the small lobby of the building.

  On one wall, bright flyers waved in the summer breeze as the door fell shut behind us, while straight ahead a man in a suit glanced up from behind a counter. He didn’t quite frown as he took in everything from our sandals to my ponytail, but he spoke with no little disdain. “Puis-je vous aider?”

  My French, which I’d had to learn for grad school, was decidedly rusty. I cleared my throat and tried anyway. “Ma mere avait l’habitude de vivre ici. Pouvons-nous jeter un coup d’œil?”

  He heard my accent and didn’t even bother speaking in French. “The residences are private.”

  “Oh. Desole. Merci.”

  Mike leaned closer. “What’d you say?”

  “Just that my mom used to live here and we wanted to look around.” I shrugged and turned. “Well, that was a fail.”

  Mike grabbed my arm. “Hey, no.” He turned back to the man. “Her mom lived here for five years.”

  I twisted so I could catch his wrist and tugged him toward the door. “It’s not a big deal. We tried.”

  The man behind the counter didn’t deign to chime in.

  Mike reached into his pocket, and I yanked harder on him, embarrassment rising. “Mike. There’s not even anything to see.”

  Behind us, the entrance bell chimed, and another wave of summer air swept in. I tugged again, determined to catch the door and be on our way. Two tall girls in slimming black passed us, chattering rapid-fire in some language I didn’t understand. They looked at Mike and one giggled.

  “Come on, Nat. Don’t you want to talk to them?” To the man he said, “There must be some way—”

  “Non. This is a private house. You can not just barge in.” He let out a puff of air. “It is this entitled attitude—”

  Mike squared his shoulders. “Come on, man—”

  “Mike, let’s just go—”

  From another door, a man emerged, this one short and broad. “Ce qui se passe?”

  The first man responded in rapid fire French far beyond me, but his frantic gestures made it quite clear we were disturbing the peace. “See?” I hissed at Mike. “Now it’s a whole issue.”

  “Jesus, Nat, I’ve never seen you so worked up.” He pulled up his most soothing smile. “Uh, bonjour. Ma copine et moi would like to look around. Is that okay?”

  Okay, he looked up how to say girlfriend in French. If I wasn’t so tense, I might find that cute.

  But seriously, he couldn’t just smile and ask the same question over and over and hope the answer would change.

  The second man opened his mouth, his gaze flicking over to include me as he spoke. “It is against policy—”

  He stopped, and his jaw dropped almost comically. “Oh, putain.”

  The other man glanced at him quickly, and then stared me down. I stood frozen.

  Mike leaned over to murmur in my ear. “I’m going to assume that was something like sacre-bleu, which is the only French curse I know.”

  Something like. “Hi.” I self-consciously pushed my hair back. He obviously recognized me—recognized my mother in me. “I’m Natalie Sullivan. My mother used to live here.”

  “You have her eyes.” He dropped the Hs so the sentence was almost entirely a river of vowels.

  I smiled uncomfortably.

  “Such a great model, your mother.” He ran his eyes up and down my body. “You also?”

  “Me? Model? No. No. I’m an archaeologist.”

  Apparently that wasn’t as cool as modeling, because his nose crinkled slightly. He craned his head to see me from different sides, and then nodded. “You are tall enough.”

  Well, excellent.

  The man nodded, then turned to Mike. His gaze lingered on the red hair. “This is your boyfriend.”

  “Yes. This is Mike O’Connor. He plays football—American football—in New York.”

  “Ahh...” The man’s expression made his thoughts on American football very clear.

  “We didn’t mean to bother you—we just thought we’d stop by—we were in the area—”

  “Come. I will do your eyes.”

  “No.” I would have backed away if I didn’t have a two-hundred pound weight holding my arm. “That’s okay. I just wanted to see where she lived.”

  “Yes, I know. I will show you and tell you about her as I do your eyes.” He walked away, not waiting to see if we’d follow. “I met her when she first arrived. She was underfed, and underdressed, and she cried every night because she was lonely and didn’t speak French. She used to sing in Russian before she fell asleep.” His voice trailed off as he rounded a corner.

  I couldn’t help it. I ran after him. “When did she learn French?”

  “Mmm. I taught her. That’s why I came here, you know? Not because of my art. Ah, no, that is why I came here, but not why the agency took me. They took me because I speak Hungarian and Russian and they needed someone to help the new girls. And I wasn’t much older than them.”

  “So what was she like? When she first came?”

  “Like everyone. Here.” He led us up a cement staircase and into a hall. He narrowed his eyes at Mike. “Men are not allowed here.”

  I grabbed Mike’s arm, not intending to let him go. Mike slid me a smile. “And yet here we are.”

  The man let out a puff of air, his cheeks inflating and deflating in exasperation. “Only because you are with Mademoiselle Bocharov.”

  “It’s Sullivan,” I corrected.

  His nose crinkled again, and I half expected him to say something along the lines of “how plebian.” How bougie? Instead, he walked us to the end of the hall. “This is the kitchen. Each girl has a small fridge.” He gestured at a wall filled with what looked like cubbies, and opened one to reveal a one by one foot space packed with milk and fruit.

  The rest of the room was pretty spartan, with just one small table by the windows. Two hot plates. One microwave. No toaster, no oven. “And they eat here?”

  “Mostly they eat downstairs. But they can keep snacks here.”

  He led us across the hall, and opened the door to a common room. Two couches sat on beige colored carpeting, and a bookcase filled with worn paperbacks stood against the far wall. Closer to us, a flat screen TV played a British show to the three girls in the room. They looked up briefly when we entered.

  Our guide waved. “The common room.”

  The smallness and gray walls would have been depressing, except that out of the corner of the window, you could just see part of the Eiffel Tower rising into the sky.

  How surreal.

  For the first time, I actually tried to picture Mom here. Here, in this room, which looked like it hadn’t changed since the eighties. Sitting on those flat cushions of the brown tweed couch, staring at the screen, or out the windows, at the rooftops and wires and the metal structure rising above all of it.

  What did she want out of life when she was here? How did she think her life was going to end up?

  Mike tugged on my hand, and I realized the man was off again, down the hall with unexpectedly fleet feet, until he reached the end of the hall. He rapped on a door. “C’est Carl.”

  The door opened, and a tall, skinny girl stood before us, with prominent cheekbones and a long, thin blade of a nose. She’d bound her hair up in a sleek bun, like a ballerina. “Quoi?”

  “C’est la fille de Madame Bocharov.” To me, he said, “This was your mother’s room.”

  I could hardly believe he remembered her actual room, but I still found myself looking past the teenager to the tiny, boxy space. Clothes were draped over chairs and th
e two twin beds, black stretchy things with sparkles and oversized sweaters that confused me.

  On the opposite wall, the window looked out toward another building. A tree waved its leaves at us. Above the beds, photos and posters formed colorful wallpaper.

  It wasn’t depressing, exactly. It was just... I couldn’t help looking back at the girl. She watched me with narrowed eyes. They weren’t like Anna’s, who must have a year or two on this girl. Anna’s eyes were angry sometimes and young at others. This girl just looked watchful. “I didn’t know she had children.” Her accent was thick and strange.

  “Just me.”

  “You have her email? Her agent’s?”

  Fourteen or fifteen and trying to network.

  Carl scowled. “Don’t bother Mademoiselle Bocharov.”

  “It’s okay.” I swallowed and smiled at the girl. “Where are you from?”

  “Ukraine.”

  “And how long have you been here?”

  “One year.”

  “And do you like it?”

  Her gaze flickered to Carl. “I love it. I have a good job, good friends. I live in the best city in the world. Though I would like to go to New York.”

  I had no idea if I believed her. She sounded sincere. Maybe she was. Maybe my mother had been, when she recalled her memories here. I’d always thought my mom couldn’t have been old enough at fourteen to know what she wanted.

  But maybe I was just being judgmental?

  Mike jumped into the silence with a smile. “Everyone in New York wants to come to Paris.”

  The girl darted a glance at him from under her long, spiky lashes, and then she smiled. For the first time she looked like a teenager, shy and cheeky. “Then they will all have to like me, because I have already lived here and can tell them all the best places.”

  Mike laughed. I tried to, but didn’t get more than a dry huff. “What do you want to do when you grow up?”

  Her eyes brightened. “I want to be like Tamara. I want to be the most beautiful model in the world, and to wear all the best designers and to marry a prince.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know what to say. Anxiety and confusion and weirdness muddled around in my belly.

  Carl coughed for attention, and then nodded to the girl and started on his way. Like a dazed child, I also nodded and followed him off, Mike beside me as we headed for the elevator.

  “Mlle. Bocharov!” The girl’s young voice piped down the hall. “Can I have your email?”

  Carl turned and barked down the hall, “Leave the mademoiselle alone!”

  She ducked her head. I swallowed, trying to decide whether to say anything, and then the elevator arrived and Carl ushered us inside.

  Back on the first floor, he led us deeper into the building, and I followed, lost in my own mind’s maze, until I realized we were standing in an airy space, with mirrors and tools and sprays. It smelled like hair and product and I stopped without telling my feet.

  Carl went toward one of the stations but I remained in my door. Mike ran his hand up my arm. “You okay?”

  I shook my head. “Remember when I said your mom must feel like she was in a fairytale, meeting all those people and seeing places she’s only heard stories of? It’s the same for me here. I feel like I fell into one of my mother’s stories. Like I’m not in reality anymore.” I reached up my palms to frame his face. “Except for you. You are the one real, true thing here.”

  Mike regarded me seriously. “I wanted you to come here because it helped me so much when you made me face my own mother. But we don’t have to stay.”

  I brushed my lips feather-light across his. “Thank you. But I will.”

  Carl had waited—not patiently—for Mike and my moment to be over, and as soon as it was, he gestured at one of the seats. “Please.” He didn’t sound like he was begging; it sounded more like a reprimand.

  First, he brushed back my hair until it lay tight against my skull, and then wound it all up at the crown of my head. Then he tilted my head back until it touched the wall, had me close my eyes, and had at my face with brushes and sponges and who knew what else.

  It didn’t feel so bad. Kind of like going to the hairdresser, where the hair washing felt almost like a massage. Here he rubbed on the moisturizer, the base, all the time keeping up a running patter about my mother. I interrupted at one point. “But was she happy here?”

  He paused. “She used to dance in the halls. She was popular with the other girls. She was a hard worker.” He teased almost absently at my hair. “She laughed so much I still remember when she did not, when she talked about her family, who she sent her money to. She was so grateful she could do that.”

  I’d never thought about her being grateful. When she talked to or about my grandparents, who had moved to Florida after she moved to the States, it was always with a high degree of irritation.

  I’d never thought about her laughing.

  Carl’s torture of my eyes was the worst. I stared up into the ceiling light as Carl poked at my lower lid so much I thought I might cry. “The light bothers you?” he asked at one point. I said yes, and he made a hmmph, and didn’t change anything.

  “Fini,” he said with satisfaction some time later, and turned me towards the mirror.

  I looked like her.

  Some of it was just tricks—the streamlining and darkening of my brows, the highlighting of cheekbones until they looked sharper than usual, the pink gloss on my lips, when I only ever wore nude and Chapstick. But mostly it came from the way he’d done my eyes, just like he’d done my mother’s eyes, when she was even younger than me. They looked the same, heavily done up in black, the lashes sooty, the shadows silvery. My eyes were huge in a face that looked poreless: huge and strange and familiar. With so much liner surrounding them, they seemed separated from me—this all seemed separated from me.

  I spun my chair to look at Mike.

  He looked back steadfastly. With anyone else, I might have made a joke about looking ridiculous or how a football player was probably used to glammed up model makeup.

  With Mike, I just offered a small lift of my shoulders.

  And he smiled that perfect crooked smile. “You look like the goddess of wisdom and war.”

  Some strange, deep emotion welled up, something I couldn’t name but that stirred in my chest and made the back of my eyes feel bright with almost-tears. Warm wind seemed to brush the back of my neck.

  I reached out a hand to Mike, and he caught it. I swallowed and turned to Carl. “Thank you.”

  He smiled. “She was my favorite, ta mere. Light and laughter. You must tell her to come back and visit. Tell her she is missed.”

  * * *

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Darling?” I could hear rustling in the background. Was she still in bed? “Good morning. Oh, no, what’s the time over there? Afternoon?”

  I only ever heard my mother’s accent in the first seconds of a phone call. Never in person, and never for more than half a minute on the phone. But for those thirty seconds I could hear a faint, lilting mesh of European accents, based on Russian, smoothed over by French. Then she went back to sounding like Mom. “Yeah, it’s almost four.”

  “So what are you doing?” More rustling, like she was getting comfortable. “You’re not working today, are you?”

  “Uh, no.” I glanced out our hotel window at the courtyard. I couldn’t see Mike, who I knew was snacking down below to give me privacy, but instead saw the pale green roof and a black cat creeping along it. It stopped to stare at me with unblinking yellow eyes, and I thought of the Art Nouveau poster of Le Chat Noir. Remembered it was a cabernet house from the nineteenth century. Wondered if my mother had gone to any of the clubs up in Montmartre. “I’m actually in Paris.”

  “What?” Her voice rose, and I heard a
door open and close. I imagined her moving into the dining room, settling at the kitchen counter, kept impeccably clean by the twice-a-week cleaning staff. “What are you doing there?”

  “Well, uh, I told you about Mike, right? The guy who owns Kilkarten? Well, we thought we’d travel for the weekend, so we’re here.” I swallowed. “Actually, we went to your old housing. I met this guy named Carl.”

  She didn’t speak for a long time, and when she did, she sounded absolutely stunned. “Wow, Carl. That brings me back.”

  In the dusk, the window slowly darkened. My reflection brightened, a ghost before the alley, my strange eyes limned in the glass. “Actually—it’s sort of funny—he did my makeup.” I laughed awkwardly.

  Another pause. “Oh, Natalya. You must look beautiful.”

  I swallowed. “Well, you know me. It’s not really my thing.”

  “I know.”

  My ear hurt, so I switched hands, and tried to keep myself from nervously pressing the phone flat against my head. “I look like you. I always thought I looked more like Dad, but I guess a lot of it’s just how you’re made up.”

  Her voice softened. “Do you remember when you were little? And I used to take you to Sherri’s and she would do both of our faces?”

  “That was weird, Mom. I was way too young.”

  She didn’t respond.

  I shifted uneasily. “You know what I mean. I didn’t want to do any of that stuff. The makeup or the dresses.”

  “I know. I just thought... You were so beautiful.”

  “You’re my mom. You weren’t supposed to think I needed makeup to be beautiful.”

  “Oh, Natalie. Oh, I don’t.”

  “I know. I just... And then it’s so weird here.”

  “Are you crying?”

  “No.” I pressed my fingers to the corners of my eyes and tried to soak up the water. “And ruin all of Carl’s work?”

  “Will you send me pictures?”

  “Pictures?” I laughed shakily. “Why?”