“What? No, no. Pont de l’Archevêché. Right by Notre Dame. You see the cars passing? No cars on Pont des Arts.”
It must have been obvious that she wanted to jump up, to steal Serge’s motorbike and drive there recklessly.
“It’s unusual for an artist to set up on this bridge. I suspect”—he looked at Serge as if for confirmation—“she was put there for the film.”
Fiona said, “But she might be in that neighborhood. Or the filmmakers might know her!”
Arnaud nodded gravely. “Small American production company, based in Seattle. Could she be living there? She could be part of the film crew and they asked her to pose on the bridge.”
And although this was a possibility—Claire did love filmmaking—it was one Fiona could deal with later. So she said, “It’s much more likely that she’s painting than working on films. Her cult—they were antitechnology. I don’t know.”
“But she left the cult.” Arnaud closed his laptop and picked up his fork, so Fiona figured she was meant to give the full story now, the one she’d only roughly sketched in her emails.
“I actually introduced her to this guy,” she said. “Kurt. He’s older, sort of a family friend. He’d be forty-one now.”
“I have the photos,” Arnaud said, strawberry at his lips.
“I didn’t mean for them to get involved, it’s just that she was spending the summer in Colorado to wait tables and explore, and he was living there. This was 2011, right after her freshman year of college. And before I know it, she’s in love, and then she isn’t going back to school in the fall, she’s going to stay in Boulder and work on some kind of ranch. And then I don’t hear from her, and I don’t hear from her, there’s no phone there, no Internet, just mail, and finally I write and tell her I’m coming to visit, and she says I can’t. Which is when I panic.”
Not that it was the first time Claire had shut her out. For an entire semester of high school, she wouldn’t speak to either parent. And one day, back when Fiona and Damian first split—Claire was nine—she ran away to the church down the street. Claire hadn’t set foot in a church at that point outside of one wedding, but Fiona had always told her that if she ever needed help in an emergency, she could go to a church and ask. By the time Claire went missing, though, Fiona had forgotten she’d said it.
When the secretary at the Episcopal church finally called, Claire had been missing for five hours, and Fiona and Damian had been combing the streets with a police officer. It was a week after 9/11, and people still watched police cruisers from the sidewalks with concern. Oddly, it was a comfort—that her crisis was part of the general trauma. They found Claire in the church office, drinking chocolate milk and sitting with two women who positively glared at Fiona and Damian. What Claire had told these women about them, about the divorce, Fiona never knew. She handed the women a twenty and grabbed Claire’s arm and marched her out while the officer and Damian stayed behind to ask questions.
It was only when Claire was in bed that night that Fiona looked at Damian, sitting there on the sofa that used to be his, too, and said, “Why do you suppose she ran away?” She kept her voice pleasant, but really she already had an answer.
He laughed and said, “Maybe it’s genetic. I mean, why did you and your brother run away?”
“I left home,” she said, “when I was eighteen. And Nico was kicked out, and you don’t ever get to mention him again.”
Damian raised his hands in surrender, if not apology.
“And my parents,” she said, “my mom showed my brother’s sketchbook to the priest. It was—Okay, I’m not talking about this to you. Do you think it’s possible, Damian, that she overheard what you said?”
And Damian looked at the carpet instead of at her, because of course that’s what had happened. The night before, after he’d dropped Claire off, he’d stayed to talk—to fight, really—and Claire hadn’t been asleep yet when he shouted at Fiona, something he hardly ever did. It had been about the divorced man Fiona had been sleeping with, or, more specifically, about the fact that this man had two children, that Fiona had spent a weekend with them in Michigan that summer. About how