It is late in the summer and the afternoon is humid and clear. A couple and an infant sit on a blanket with a picnic lunch. The infant is a new crawler and moves anxiously from side to side on the blanket, the parents barricading the child from crawling off the blanket and into the grass. The couple is young, blond stubble on the man’s face and the woman’s hair highlighted an array of browns and reds. The woman is barefoot and the man wears a white T-shirt and his arms are lean and tanned. Occasionally, the man will lift the child and toss him, or her, into the air and the child grins and claps closed fists together. Then the man will set the infant back down and the child crawls until it bumps into its mother’s legs and then it turns around and heads back across the length of the blanket.
Jon lies on his side on his own blanket and watches the couple and infant. Estelle and Jennifer try to get a kite into the air, running freely across the open space of the park. Jon has already tried and failed with the kite but Jennifer seemed interested in the effort and so now Estelle works with her, hoping to catch the perfect breeze that will lift the rainbow-striped kite into the air. The couple and infant are in Jon’s line of vision of Estelle and Jennifer, and when there is a delay in their effort, a tangled string or dead air, Jon watches the new family as if he knows them.
The summer has set records for both heat and lack of rain. A free production of Romeo and Juliet scheduled for the garden of the Musée Rodin was canceled because the actors feared collapse wearing the heavy Elizabethan costumes. A hardware store in Jon and Estelle’s neighborhood gave away rain gauges as a promotion, hoping to conjure up storm clouds. The river sits low and the city has cut back on the hours that the public fountains run. But the summer is almost over and the temperatures are beginning to creep down. Half of Paris is hopeful for a rainy autumn and the other half is bitter that they have to hope for a rainy autumn that will clump the fallen leaves and cause the winter to hurry on. The only ones that haven’t noticed the dry gardens and park lawns are the ones who get on planes after they check out of their hotels and go home.
Jennifer yells, “Look!” and Jon sees the kite rise into the air and maintain as Estelle runs with the kite string. The couple with the infant also turns and looks and Jennifer stands with her arm raised and finger pointed skyward. Others across the lawn who have heard Jennifer’s cry look up and smile and tell their children to look at the kite. Jon sits up. Jennifer puts her hand over her eyes to shield the sun. The moment lasts for as long as Estelle can keep running, which isn’t long, and when she’s done and the kite swirls to the ground, heads turn back to cool drinks or conversation. Estelle bends over, winded, her hands on her knees. Jennifer looks at Jon and he waves but she doesn’t wave back and she goes to Estelle and helps her gather the kite and string. They walk past the couple and infant, who are picking up to leave, and sit down with Jon. Estelle still hasn’t caught her breath and Jon says, “You need some work.”
“At least we got it in the air, didn’t we?” Estelle answers and looks at Jennifer.
Jennifer nods and takes a bottle of water from a plastic bag they brought with them that is filled with drinks and sandwiches and chips. “I want to run with it next time,” she says.
The suggestion pleases her parents and then Estelle says, “We’ll try again in a few minutes. Do you want to eat something?” Again Jennifer nods and she takes a tuna sandwich from the bag.
“I think I saw an ice cream cart on the other side of the park. Would you like some?” Jon asks.
“Later,” Jennifer says.
Again, her response pleases them because these answers are more of the answers of their Jennifer. The Jennifer who was athletic and energetic and never turned down a dessert. The Jennifer who sits in front of them now shows glimpses of that child through the quiet stares and one-word sentences and each glimpse is met with wide smiles.
It will be a work in progress. Be patient. You are one of the lucky ones. These phrases, and others like them, have been given to Jon and Estelle over and over by the voices of children’s services. The words float in their minds when they look at Jennifer. Whether it is a doctor, or a therapist, or a social worker, the clichés sit on the tips of their tongues, as common as hello or good-bye. The first time that the therapist said to them that they were lucky, Jon said, “You have a strange idea of luck.”
“In your case, life itself is luck,” he answered. He was a sleek, smart-looking man with a pointed chin and Jon didn’t like him from the start.
“I don’t believe in luck,” Estelle said.
“Me either,” Jon said.
“Whatever you believe in, you may attribute her return to that. Not many children return after they have been missing for more than two days, let alone months.”
“We know,” Jon said and the next day he complained to children’s services that he didn’t want a therapist assigned to his daughter who would tell them each week how fucking lucky they were. Estelle stood next to him in the kitchen as he spoke on the telephone, nodding and holding his arm. After he hung up the phone, he asked her if she knew she was touching him.
“Yes,” she said.
“I hoped so. You can whenever you want.”
“Sometimes I want to,” she said. “But sometimes I don’t want anything.”
“Maybe just a little now and then. Like this. Just touch my arm or hand. Small things.”
“You sound like the people we talk to about Jennifer. Everything has to be so small now. I feel like an inchworm.”
He had apologized to Estelle in letters, in cards, in phone calls from work. The urge to do it again rose in him and she saw it coming and stopped him.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Maybe what?” he asked.
“Only maybe.”
Jennifer finishes her sandwich and says, “I’m ready.”
“Why don’t you try by yourself?” Estelle asks. “And then I’ll come along if you need me.”
She ponders it a moment, looks across the park at other children playing alone, no adult in sight. She picks at the grass and says, “Promise you’ll watch?”
“We’re right here, we promise,” Jon says.
Jennifer takes the kite and walks into a clear stretch of grass, plenty of room to run. She turns and says, “Watch.”
“Go ahead. It’s okay,” Estelle says. Then she whispers to Jon, “I hate this.”
“They said to help her try things again on her own. She’s right there. She can do it.” He reaches over and holds her hand and she lets him.
Even on the best of days, it has been difficult to shake the image of Jennifer sitting on the cot in the small room at the police station. Fifteen pounds were missing from her already thin frame. Her head was shaved and her lips badly cracked from dehydration. She wore a hospital gown and her dirty, soiled clothes were piled on the floor. Her wrists had rope burns from being bound so tightly. It took them two weeks to gather the nerve to ask Marceau what they found out from the man they arrested.
“There is something very troubling occurring between here and Brussels,” he said. He sat with them in their living room on a chair brought from the kitchen table, his legs crossed and his hat in his lap. Estelle and Jon sat on the edge of the couch, uncomfortable but ready for some answers. “It is almost like a game. Children are disappearing and becoming a sort of currency. As far as we can tell, there is a system in place where these children can be exchanged for one another. No money is involved. The people meet, size up what the other has, and will trade the children as if they were used cars. We believe that this is what happened to Jennifer the day the woman reported seeing her, that the men with her had either just traded for her or were on their way to swap her for another child. The man that we found Jennifer with was the third person to have her. You can imagine how difficult this is making things for us with these children constantly on the move from city to city, or in some cases from country to country.” Marceau spoke without emotion, describing the situation as if he were describing a bowl of soup.
“Then why was she in such bad shape?” Jon asked.
“That’s the same question we asked and the man told us that this is the way she was given to him. He had planned to clean her up but hadn’t gotten around to it. Otherwise, we’ll have to wait until she is ready to talk to fill in the blanks.”
And they continue to wait, but after four months, she hasn’t been ready to talk about the time from her abduction until the time of her return. Not to the police, not to the therapist, not to Estelle and Jon. They know what the medical reports told them but they only waited on Jennifer. Estelle and Jon have not allowed anyone to push her, believing that Jennifer will talk when she’s ready, though they would prefer all the answers, no matter how harsh, to what their imagination has done with the missing time. The only thing that Jennifer has disclosed is how it happened. How she was bored at the museum, and while the class was moving from one painting to another, she skipped out and went to the restaurant on the top floor. After a candy bar and Coke, she went to return to the group but they had moved into another area of the museum and a short, balding man in a navy-blue suit asked her if she was lost. When she said yes, he explained that he worked for the museum and that he thought her group had gone outside to the school bus. He put his hand on her shoulder and walked her out of the front doors of the museum, then around to the side and to the back. The bus was there and they walked to it but it was empty, and on the other side of the bus was a van. A man in a similar suit got out and approached them and they forced her into the van. Jennifer gave this account a week after returning home, sitting at the police station at Marceau’s desk, a tape recorder running and her parents flanking her. She stopped twice to say that she tried to get away, tried to scream, tried to fight, as if she needed to prove that it wasn’t her choice.
Estelle takes a bag of potato chips from the plastic bag. She offers one to Jon and he declines. Then she says, “She’s looking better.”
“Still too thin,” Jon says.
“I know. But her hair, her face. She’s getting there, right?”
They watch Jennifer, and if they didn’t know her, she could easily be taken for a boy. Her hair has grown slowly and is darker than before and her knees and elbows appear to have their own agenda as her thin frame runs with the kite string. She stumbles and falls as she looks back to see if the kite is in the air. Jon starts to get up, but Jennifer gives an “I’m okay” wave.
“Is she sleeping any better?” Jon asks. Estelle and Jennifer moved into the big bed when she came home, leaving Jon on the couch. Most nights are filled with shouts from dreams, panic in the dark. There has been no mention of Jennifer moving back into her own room.
“Not really,” Estelle says.
School begins in a week but Jennifer will not go. She doesn’t want to see friends, ashamed of her appearance. “Not until my hair comes back,” she says and her parents agree. And there have recently been more complex questions from her. “Does everyone know?” she asked Estelle in the grocery store. Then later in the day, as the three of them ate lunch at M. Conrer’s café, she asked, staring between them, “What do I tell people?”
“We’ll talk about that later,” Jon said after exchanging an empty look with Estelle, but neither has figured out how to answer. The therapist warned them to be prepared for such questions, but it was like being told to prepare for a bullet.
Jennifer calls for her mother to come and help and Estelle hands Jon the bag of chips and goes to her. Jon mindlessly finishes the chips though he’s not hungry. He wonders if Iris found the note he slid under her door earlier in the week. Have you finished? is all it said. It was the first time he had been back to see her since Jennifer’s return. He figures Iris knows, as it was on the news and in the newspaper, and he wonders if the popularity of Jennifer’s return may have dissuaded the portrait’s completion, the subject now too mainstream for Iris. Estelle mentioned the painting of Jennifer as they sat up one night and listened for Jennifer to call out in her sleep, and Jon was happy to answer honestly that he hadn’t been back.
“Do you still want it?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Do you?”
“No. Not really.”
But he took her interest as a kind of permission, and the next afternoon after work, he stopped at Iris’s apartment. The door was locked. No sound from inside. He scribbled the note and slid it under the door and left relieved.
Estelle and Jennifer have little luck without a breeze and they return to the blanket. “Would you like the ice cream now?” Jon asks.
“Okay,” Jennifer says. “Vanilla on the inside, chocolate on the outside.”
“Me too,” Estelle says and Jon promises to be right back.
He follows a curvy pebble pathway across the park, avoiding bicycles and soccer balls as he walks with his hands in his pockets. He looks over his shoulder now and then at Jennifer and Estelle. He comes to the ice cream cart and stands in line behind a teenage couple holding hands, twin girls no older than Jennifer, and an old man who wears a sweater despite the heat. As he waits he looks across the park. The sun has fallen in the afternoon sky and many find relief in the growing shadows of the trees. The breeze picks up and he hopes to make another attempt with the kite, to show Jennifer that it can be done. He moves up in line and buys what Jennifer and Estelle asked for, and walking back, he feels the ice cream already beginning to melt, so he begins to trot. Back at the blanket, his wife and daughter lie on their backs, hands behind their heads.
“Better eat it fast,” he says and they sit up and Jennifer thanks him.
“No napkins?” Estelle asks and he shakes his head.
Halfway through the ice cream, the drips have made their hands sticky and Jon holds the plastic bag while they toss away what’s left. Jennifer says, “Can we go?”
“Sure,” Estelle answers. “There’s a fountain by the gate and we can wash our hands.” The three of them stand and Jon folds the blanket and puts it over his shoulder. Estelle picks up the plastic bag. Jennifer stands between her mother and father and takes a hand from each of them. They walk at a leisurely pace across the park, the sun behind them and their shadow before them, their silhouette providing a glimpse of what they used to be as they make their way home.