The Eiffel Tower feels very familiar from all the photos I’ve seen, but the sight of it still takes my breath away — with its lights on, it looks like a sword of fire rising up out of the ground, even the fog hanging back warily, like it doesn’t want to get burned. Near the very top, two thin beams of light turn slow circles, as if searching for someone who’s hiding out in the city. All around me on Pont d’Iéna, tourists and locals slow down to crane their necks and gawk. It’s magnificent. Amazing. And I’m not just tingling with awe but sagging with relief — at last, something has gone perfectly today. I am going to get to complete my parents’ Paris trip for Dad. A part of him will make it to the top of the tower, after all.
“Serena — slow down, wait for me!”
I stop so suddenly that the stream of tourists heading for the crossing at the foot of the bridge breaks apart like a wave. I force myself to turn around (which isn’t easy, given what’s on the other side of the street) and see that Ethan is just finishing up paying the taxi driver.
To my left, a crêpe stand and a small souvenir hut look almost embarrassed by the gaudy carousel that’s behind them. To my right, a stone column topped by a statue of a man walking a horse (they’re both naked — obviously) obscures my view of what I know from my research to be the Trocadéro, where we were just driving in the taxi. Ethan tried to run down some facts and trivia about it, but I wasn’t listening. I’m sure it’s great, but it wasn’t what I was here for.
Am here for.
I raise a hand in a kind of “Sorry” gesture, then turn back, taking a deep breath to let the sight wash over me again, hoping it’s as awesome as it was before Ethan distracted me. Before I can reabsorb the view, he appears on my right.
“Hey,” he says. I mumble “Hey” back, as I shift my cross-body bag to my right side. It makes holding hands with Ethan a little awkward as we take the crossing, but I’m barely thinking about that right now. The closer we get to the tower, the more my body floods with adrenaline — no way do I feel like I got in on a red-eye this morning.
Finally, we’ve crossed the six lanes of traffic. I quickly get a sore neck from walking with my head leaned back so I can take it all in. I can’t help noticing that, up close, all this tangled iron looks kind of … ugly. But it gets a pass, because it’s the Eiffel Tower! I see a line of people waiting to be admitted, and my legs seem to move independently, running toward it …
Well, I would be running toward it, if not for Ethan keeping a firm grip on my hand and tugging me back.
“Let me get a picture first,” he says, reaching into his coat and taking out his phone. I try to ignore the flush of disappointment I feel in my chest — a cell-phone camera is not exactly going to get the best-quality shot of me in this world-famous landmark.
But I tell myself, it’s not about the quality of the photo — it’s about capturing the moment.
Ethan walks backward, away from me, and I try to stay loose, like in the other photos I’ve “posed” for today.
“What are you doing?” Ethan asks. “Why are you looking up like that?”
“That’s kind of what I was doing before you wanted to take the picture,” I tell him. “It’s the Eiffel Tower — I should look at it, right?”
“Why don’t you just look here, at me?” he says, dropping into a crouch and turning his phone sideways. “That’s how photos are supposed to be.”
I look at him.
He doesn’t take the photo. He points toward my hips. “Could you just …?”
I take my hands out of my pockets, let them hang by my sides.
“And smile …”
Being asked to smile suddenly makes my facial muscles get a little tight, but I do my best. As soon as his phone flashes, I relax and start to turn and walk toward the line again.
“Ah, damn …” I hear him mumbling. I turn back, seeing him still crouched, looking at his phone with a grimace. For a guy who’s so convinced I’m his matching jigsaw piece, he’s not shy about letting me know I am not all that photogenic.
“Let’s get one more,” he calls out, “but this time, maybe untie your hair?”
I laugh. “That won’t make it any less of a mess.”
“Then what about that scarf you bought,” he says, pointing at my cross-body bag. “Put that on, you’ll look all cool and Parisian.”
“It’s a photo of me at the Eiffel Tower,” I say, using both hands to point to the world-famous landmark right above us and — for a split second — kind of hoping Ethan has the presence of mind to take a photo right now. “How much more Parisian can it get? Besides, I got the scarf as a joke for my sister — I was never going to wear it.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun and ironic, right?”
“Okay …” I reach into the bag and take out the scarf. It is just one photo, I guess. When I’ve put it on, I do my best to strike a pose — I stand with my feet wide apart, hold on to the edges of the scarf, look right at the camera and give a big smile.
Ethan misses the one-second window he has to take the photo while my smile looks natural. He just frowns at his phone — at me on his phone. “You sure you don’t want to try it with your hair down?”
“I’m getting kind of cold here,” I say.
Another flash, and this time, he stands up. He nods at his phone as he draws level with me. “Cool. Look.”
He turns his phone so I can see the shot. Everything is perfectly framed, even if the fog looks thicker and grayer than it does in real life. The way I’m standing dead center in front of the arch formed by the tower’s base, with fiery light falling over me, does look kind of cool — but there’s something off. It’s not just that Ethan appears to have taken the photo the second my smile started to freeze.
For some reason, I almost don’t recognize myself.
“Now get one of me,” he says, taking the spot where I was just standing and almost making a shooing gesture as he signals that I should step back. When I’m in position, he stands perfectly still, hands hanging by his side, big smile, all of his attention on the camera, not the sight — the photo serving only as proof that he visited the Eiffel Tower, rather than capturing whatever experience he might have been having. What would Jean-Luc say about this?
He is here just to be here.
After I’ve taken the photo, I hand the phone back to him, and Ethan suggests we take a selfie together.
“We’ve got time for that,” I tell him, maybe a little quickly. “The tower’s not going anywhere, right?”
He grins at me. “Of course!” Then he positions himself on my left, so that he can take the hand not blocked by my cross-body bag, and — at last! — we join the line.
We stand in silence for a little while. The line isn’t moving at all, and I start to feel nervous and tense, because I can only think of asking Ethan how his trip has been, but I really don’t want to have small talk. I’m standing in line for the Eiffel Tower, at Christmas — whatever we talk about should be meaningful, right? I reach across with my free hand to tap on Ethan’s arm and get his attention. His reaction is ninja-quick, reaching out to take my second hand so that both are now braced in his.
“Hey, when we get back to New York, will you help me with my scrapbook? I think Mom will love it, and it’ll be a way of honoring Dad. A way of making clear, he’s still kind of with us, you know? And it really does work, too, because up until I got here, I felt like the whole family was kind of forgetting him. We weren’t trying to do that, but his presence has been sort of fading, becoming a kind of” — (wisp) — “ghost in our memories. But today, I feel like I’ve been able to see my dad’s face, how it was, how I remember it. I figure, if I can nail this scrapbook, then maybe we won’t have to worry about losing our memories of him, you know?”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” he says, now eyeballing a couple, not much older than us, a little way up the line but just on the edge of it. He’s trying to figure out whether they’re cutting. It seems to take a big effort for him to look back at me long enough to say: “Memories fade over time, though. It’s natural that you guys will forget him, a little. Don’t you think that, by trying so hard to hang on to them, you might be hurting yourself more?”
I have to focus to ignore the voice in my head that’s trying to tell me something. I’ve come this far. And he’s not going to change my mind, anyway.
“I can’t imagine anything worse than forgetting my dad,” I say, faking like I need to check my phone, so that I have an excuse to take back one of my hands. I make out like I’m surprised there’s nothing there, then put my phone in my bag and keep the hand to myself. “I miss him every day — and I’ll be honest, I’ve missed him more than ever since I got here. Really, this day has kind of been more sucky than fun” — I don’t have time to answer his flinch with anything reassuring right now — “but the good moments have mostly been when something has made me feel close to him.” And singing on the party boat … but I’m not going to tell Ethan that story. “I want to hold on to all of them.”
He’s still eyeballing the cutters, but he squeezes my hand and holds me closer. I guess he’s trying to be encouraging. “Reality isn’t fair, Serena. You have your own life, your own future. Do you ever think that maybe that’s the thing you should be trying hard to remember?”
I’m glad he’s not looking at me right now — because I think the disappointment on my face would totally crush him. Ethan just doesn’t get it. The weird thing is, he’s right — of course dwelling on how much I miss Dad is going to make me sad, of course I should be trying to get on with my life. But he told me this in such a casual way, like he was recommending I take an umbrella with me because it might rain. Did it ever occur to him that I might simply be hurting?
“Hallelujah!” he cheers, as the line shuffles forward, slowly. And I’m realizing that what doesn’t move slowly is life. The two years since Dad passed away feel like nothing, and what about the next two years? Will I wake up tomorrow, a college junior, wondering how I came to be living with the wrong guy … in West Orange!?
“This light show is supposed to be phenomenal,” Ethan is saying now. “They say that, from the tower, it will look like the lights are bathing the whole city, first in the French tricolor, then red and green … I guess, because it’s Christmas.”
I don’t know how great it’s going to look, though, with all the fog. Wonder what Ethan will say when things don’t go according to plan.
“Word is, they are going to do something similar at the Colosseum in Rome next year. Maybe we could check it out?”
I don’t say anything. The line shuffles forward some more, but now my legs barely move. I’m remembering again that night after Thanksgiving, Charlotte and me in our dorm, Charlotte asking if I really thought “simple and easy” was what was best for me.
“Simple and easy” has gotten me to the Eiffel Tower, which was the Big Finish to the Romance Tour. Because of “simple and easy,” I now have a shot at making sure a piece of Dad makes it here, as he planned to twenty-five years ago. I might now get the perspective — literally and figuratively — to understand what it meant to my parents to be in this city together.
Together …
They were here together. The two of them. All right, they didn’t make it to the tower, but what are the stories they told me? Mom forgetting the reservation and them ending up at Maison d’angle; the silly scarf; Mom buying Dad caffeinated coffees even after his usual one o’clock cutoff, because he was struggling so much with jet lag. The way they laughed about it later, whenever they brought it up, because what they remembered was not so much the city as the joy of being there with each other.
I’m starting to see why Mom made no effort to get out of her conference.
Paris without Dad was going to be too hard for her.
My parents got to experience this city with the One.
That is not what I’m doing. I’m here with the nice, simple and easy guy, and I’m feeling shitty, because I’m hurting both of us right now.
We shuffle forward until we’re next in line for the elevator that will take us up. The guard at the front of the line asks Ethan for our tickets, which Ethan took out of his coat pocket about fifty feet ago. He hands them over for inspection, then looks at me happily. I try to match his happiness but can feel that I’m not really succeeding — once again, everything around me feels distant, like a photocopy of itself. Like I’m not really here. Because even though he’s looking right at me — which he’s done a lot tonight — I still feel like he doesn’t see me.
We don’t see each other.
The guard hands back the tickets, then says something into the walkie-talkie pinned to his collarbone. A few seconds later, he nods to Ethan, and the elevator doors open with a scraping groan and an echoing clatter that make me flinch. I can feel my hand squeezing Ethan’s, but not from excitement or anything like that — suddenly, every part of me wants to pull back, to get away from here. But Ethan is already walking toward the elevator, and I’m being led along.
I lean back to sink my weight down to my feet. Ethan is already inside the elevator when he realizes what I’m doing.
He narrows his eyes at me, his jaw setting and his teeth clenching — he’s confused about why I’m suddenly pulling away from him, and I can tell he’s dreading what I am going to say.
His hand goes limp, and I slide mine out.
“I’m so sorry …” I say as the elevator doors begin to close. I turn away from the Eiffel Tower and walk past the guard. He calls out something in French to me, but I don’t look back.
*
As soon as the traffic lights turn red, I run across Quai Branly, take the stairs down to the riverbank and don’t stop running until I’m underneath a bridge — Pont d’Iéna — that arches across the Seine like a stone canopy.
It’s almost totally dark, the light from Quai Branly deflected by the bridge and cutting a lazy zigzag pattern on the Seine. The rippling water nudges the small flight of steps that leads off the bank, as if it’s thinking about flooding the city. The fog stops on either side of the bridge, pondering whether it wants to crawl beneath the bridge with me.
I walk forward and slump down onto the top step. A group of well-dressed office types walk by me, and I wonder if they’re on their way to a Christmas party. I bet none of them are going to find themselves on board a not tour boat, being forced to sing a Christmas song because they look like someone who sounds like someone famous.
God, that was so crazy. Absolutely humiliating when it happened, but I have the feeling that, when I get back to campus and Charlotte asks me about Paris, that story is going to be one of the first that I’ll tell. How I was so keen to do a boat tour, I totally ignored all the warning signs that we were getting on the wrong boat. How much fun I had dancing with French strangers and sipping champagne with Jean-Luc …
And now I’m laughing, because that was funny. I think I even knew that it was at the time — between the mortification when we were thrown off and the dread of being in a part of Paris that even Jean-Luc didn’t really know, there was a moment where I thought, This is so ridiculous, so insane … And I actually wasn’t thinking about the Romance Tour, wasn’t missing Dad, wasn’t feeling abandoned by Mom or Lara … I was just being here, experiencing something and laughing about it. Making a memory. Like, Hey, remember that time we accidentally gate-crashed some corporate Christmas party boat?
I wince at my mental use of “we.” What, do I expect to be reminiscing about this with Jean-Luc in the future?
He’s definitely not smiling over any part of the day we spent together. I’d be surprised if he’s thinking about anything other than how I told him he was selfish, knowing that I was using the same word he used to describe his father. I mean, I did have a right to be mad — he had forced me to leave Maison d’angle — but I’ll admit that was a low blow.
My vision swims with tears. Would this day have gone better if I hadn’t so easily gotten into arguments with Jean-Luc? Is it my fault that I’ve ended up alone — again, as always — today?
Another party boat crawls by, blaring some French pop song that’s so absurdly upbeat, all I can do is laugh bitterly and take out my cell phone to check the time.
The Romance Tour: officially canceled at 9:06 p.m.
I’m about to put my phone back into my bag, when my eyes fall on the Eiffel Tower scarf. For some reason, the fact that I was able to get only one lame, tacky souvenir makes me feel the failure of this trip even more than getting nothing at all. Now, whenever I look at the scrapbook, I’m going to notice the absence of actual keepsakes along with the crap photos of a foggy Paris …
I need to stop thinking about my failures. I need to feel better.
I need to call Mom.
“Serena?” Mom’s voice drops into a baritone — which it always does when she’s concerned about me. It’s her version of Dad’s narrow-eyed suspicion. “What’s wrong?”
“Next time I say I’ve got a great idea” — I hold the phone away from my voice for a second, so she won’t hear the gross sound of me wiping my nose — “I want you to say ‘O Holy Night.’”
“Why?”
“Because, from now on, that’s going to be our code for ‘most epic of epic disasters…’ ”
When I lift the phone back to my ear, she’s in the middle of saying something consoling: “… feel better when we’re all together in London, I promise. I promise.” She sighs, the noise crackly. “I knew Paris would be too hard for you … I should have tried to talk you out of doing this, and I’m sorry I didn’t try harder, sweetie.”
“It’s not your fault, Mom. You know what I’m like when I get something in my head. I just didn’t think anything could ever go this wrong.” Then I go into full brain-dump mode, running through all my ambitious plans for the Romance Tour and how almost every stage was totally ruined.
“And I have literally just come from the Eiffel Tower. I was there less than ten minutes ago, and I was with Ethan — you know, that guy from school, I might have told you about him?”
“The kisstastrophe guy, yeah.” There’s a chance I might tell my mom too much.
“We had tickets,” I go on, “and we were about to get on the elevator to go up, and I was thinking I was about to do something great for you and Dad, make sure that a part of him finally did make it to the Eiffel Tower … but I couldn’t do it, Mom.”
“Oh, honey, you shouldn’t feel bad about that. It’s understandable if this trip made you just too sad.”
I’m quiet for so long, Mom starts calling my name like we’ve been disconnected.
“I’m here,” I say, my voice wet and croaky. “I’m sorry I badgered you about the Romance Tour — it didn’t occur to me just how hard it could have been for you. I’m sorry.”
“Sweetie, you don’t have to apologize to me. You were trying to do a nice thing.”
“That’s just it … I said this trip was about honoring Dad, putting together the scrapbook — but do you know something?”
I fall quiet, my jaw clenching — like my mouth refuses to say the thing I’m about to say.
“Honey? Talk to me. Now.” Mom’s really worried. I can hear it in her voice — whenever she’s short and sharp, that’s what it means. “What is it?”
“I …” I take a deep breath, now grinding my teeth together like I’m trying to break them all. “I can’t, Mom … It’s too horrible.”
“I’m sure it’s not.”
I realize full tears started streaming down my face at some point. I didn’t notice. I’ve been too busy feeling the hot fire crawling up out of my heart, into my throat.
I wipe my eyes again, but they instantly refill. “I came here for Dad — and you — and I was so excited to come here and see everything you guys saw, pay some kind of tribute to your marriage and hopefully put together a great keepsake so that we could all remember him, but … I actually forgot him today. There was, like, an hour or so — I was on this boat, drinking and dancing, having a good time, and I did not think about Dad once. Isn’t that horrible?”
Mom says nothing, and I’m picturing her giving her hotel room a stern look, as if I was there for her to scold.
I can’t bear the silence, so I fill it. “Of course it’s horrible. What kind of ‘grieving’ daughter forgets about her dad, just because she’s having fun on some party boat? The kind who says she’s making a present for her family but is really hoping that if she relives her parents’ romantic story, she might somehow teach herself what love is actually about. That’s who.”
It’s only now I realize that I’ve been feeling a little tight, a little tense, all day, and that perhaps this was because I felt bad that the Romance Tour had a kind of selfish motive. It feels good to admit this to Mom, but I start laughing at myself.
“Ugh, that’s so lame, right? ‘Poor me, I’ve never had a real boyfriend — maybe going halfway across the world will fix that.’ Well, I went halfway across the world and randomly ran into my perfect match, and it still didn’t feel right, so I have no clue what I’m going to do now.”
Mom finally speaks and doesn’t sound mad. I almost resent her for forgiving me, for loving me so much. “If it didn’t feel right, then he wasn’t your perfect match.”
“Mom, you haven’t met this guy. He likes most of the things I like, he’s as organized as I am” — well, as organized as I like to be, when life and circumstances and plan-ruining French guys aren’t getting in my way — “he wants the same things out of life that I do. We’d be like you and Dad — we’d never have an argument.”
Now it’s Mom who’s laughing. “It’s good that you can still make jokes, sweetie,” she says. “That tells me you’re going to be okay.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wait, you were serious? You really think your dad and I never had fights?”
“Well, yeah …”
Now she’s laughing even harder. “Oh, Serena … Your dad and I had arguments.”
“What?”
“All the time! You girls never heard us, because we had a rule about not raising our voices at each other, but some nights after you were in bed, we would have some pretty serious fights. It’s funny to me now, we would have them in whispers, but they were fights, nonetheless.”
I try to speak but only strangled noises come out of my mouth. Finally, I manage: “I can’t believe you hid them from us.”
“Oh, seriously, you should be glad we did. Before you girls were born, your dad and I could really go at each other. It’s hard for kids to see this in their parents, because you think of us as a single parenting unit, but your dad and I were really very different, and sometimes that meant we just annoyed the hell out of each other. So, yes, we did used to fight. In fact, I think …” Mom stays silent so long, I think I’ve lost her. “Yeah, I think it was a fight in Paris that convinced us we needed to find a different way of having our disagreements.”
I can feel my jaw gaping — I’m totally stunned by what I’m hearing right now. “What happened?”
“On our last day in Paris, we had such a huge fight and got so mad at each other, we actually needed a break. So we stormed off and didn’t talk for about a day … Because of that, we” — she can barely speak for laughing now — “we missed out on getting to the Eiffel Tower.”
I have to press my phone to my cheek to make sure it doesn’t slip out of my frozen hand. The way my luck has been today, I wouldn’t be surprised if it bounced all the way into the river. “That’s why you never made it?” I ask Mom. “Because you had a fight?”
“Yep … Still think our honeymoon was the most romantic ever?”
“You missed the Eiffel Tower to spite each other?” This whole story sounds so unlike my parents, it’s making me wonder if I’m still asleep on my flight, and this is all some weird fever dream.
“Oh, no, it wasn’t spite — we just couldn’t stand to be around each other after an argument. We always needed about six hours or so to really calm down. And do you know something? Twenty-five years later, I honestly can’t remember what that fight was even about. We’d been needling each other all day, about lots of things — I was mad at your dad because he forgot to book tickets for the Musée d’Orsay, even though he knows how much I love Van Gogh, and your dad … Huh … That’s what it was. Your dad made some joke about how I only ever got into Van Gogh to impress my high school boyfriend, Gerald, who was an artist.” She goes quiet for a second, and I can picture her staring into space, remembering that day. I can tell from her voice that she’s got a sad smile on her face, and I wish my arms were long enough to reach London.
Or that I was just in London, so I could hug her.
“That’s why we missed the tower,” Mom goes on. “Whenever your dad started thinking or talking about Gerald, you could guarantee that we’d soon be yelling at each other.”
“He was jealous?” I ask.
“Back then, he was,” Mom admits. “I think us missing the Eiffel Tower bothered him so much, he realized he was only causing problems by being jealous. He never got mad about Gerald after that — in fact, a few years later, we all went to a high school reunion, and the two of them got along great.”
I take a deep breath. Try not to sound as shocked as I feel. “But why did you guys always talk about Paris so much, when you had such huge fights and never got to see all the things you wanted to?”
“Because even a few months after we got back, it was all we could talk about.” I can hear in her voice that Mom is still smiling, but it’s not a sad smile now. “Yeah, we missed a few things, but would we have preferred to stand in front of a few Van Gogh paintings for an hour when, all those years later, we were telling people how amazing Maison d’angle was? Or about how I had to eat a second dinner on our first night there because your dad mistakenly ordered clams and was too proud to admit to the waitress that he didn’t really speak French?” I laugh with her. Dad was allergic to shellfish. “For us, it wasn’t the sights — it was being together that made it special. I would probably not remember how I felt staring at a Van Gogh, no matter how great the art. But I’ll never forget the joy of just being with the person I loved in some random corner restaurant, half the world away from home.”
I stand up, because my butt is kind of going numb from sitting on this cold step for so long. “All this time,” I say, “I thought everything was perfect, beginning with your honeymoon.”
“It was perfect to us. And that’s kind of all that really matters.”
“So it didn’t matter that you weren’t always the best fit for each other?”
Mom’s voice is soft, at once firm and comforting. “Honey, people are perfect fits only when they’re in the movies. In real life, relationships require effort. When it’s right, it’s worth it.”
“But how do you know when it’s right?”
“You don’t, not always. It’s a gamble. But it pays off. Your dad might be gone, but I will never, ever feel cheated, because being married to him brought more good into my life than losing him has taken away.”
I can feel more tears streaming down my cheeks as Mom talks, my head and my heart feeling so much lighter. My mother may be in London, and my sister in Madrid, but I no longer feel stranded and alone in a foreign city.
Even though it’s not in the way that I planned, Paris has fixed my family this Christmas.
I tell my mom that I love her, miss her and will see her in London tomorrow. She tells me the same, then:
“Wait, before you go …”
“Yeah, Mom?”
“What you were saying earlier, about forgetting your dad for an hour?”
Crap, I forgot I was due a ticking off. “I know, I know,” I tell her. “It won’t happen again, I promise.”
“I wasn’t mad at you for that. Truth be told, I was happy to hear it.”
“You were?”
I hear a strangled sob. Now it’s Mom who’s crying. “Sweetie, you don’t know what it’s been like these past two years, watching my happy, sweet little girl suddenly change. You used to smile so much — all the time — and now you don’t. And I couldn’t do anything to make you smile, and it broke my heart, every day … Because I know you were just trying not to show me how sad you were — but that never meant you couldn’t be happy. And for a while, I’ve wondered if you ever could be happy again, because you seemed so … I don’t know, like …”
“Like I’m not really here?” I give her the words I think she’s searching for. The words that seem to have come up more than a few times today.
“Yes.”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” I tell her. “Never again.”
We finish our goodbyes. I end the call and stand in the darkness beneath Pont d’Iéna, letting the tears flow, feeling like the tension and grief are draining out of me, the same way the Paris fog finally seems to be lifting.
When I put my cell phone back in my cross-body bag, I see that tacky scarf again. Jean-Luc might have been too generous when he said it was worth five euros.
I ball it up and throw it into the Seine. I’m going to leave Paris with my own memories, not forgeries of the ones my parents made on their honeymoon. No more walking in anyone else’s footsteps — from now on, I walk in my footsteps, and those footsteps have to be taking me forward.
And even though the conversation with Mom has left me kind of drained, I find the energy in my legs to run out of the shadows of the bridge, into the light of Quai Branly, toward Pont de l’Alma Metro station.