Paris Is Always a Good Idea - Jenn McKinlay Page 0,58

could pick up the blue-line train, which would take me into the city center, since the airport was twenty-five kilometers outside of Paris. Normally while traveling, I could switch off my expectations and downshift into a sort of travel Zen; things would happen when they happened, and there was no need to get upset. Of course this was mostly because I spent weeks and weeks preparing for every possible contingency.

Still, it was a giving-up-control sort of mind-set that usually served me well when I was out of my comfort zone, but today, that feeling was gone. I knew it was because I didn’t have my phone or my cow pajamas or even a toothbrush. It was easy to feel all que será, será when you could reach out to anyone anytime and anywhere, but now I felt cut off and abandoned, and I hated it.

The only upside to not having my carry-on bag was that I navigated the thick crowds with a cheetah-like speed and grace, maneuvering in and around people and their stuff, unencumbered. I knew I was really going to miss my cow pajamas tonight, however.

I leaped from the shuttle to the platform with the blue-line ticket dispenser. I waited for the train with a crush of travelers and then hopped aboard as soon as the departing passengers got off. I had to check the colorful diagram on the inside of the train to figure out what my stop was. It looked like I’d have to do some train hopping to get there. Online, I’d found a sweet studio apartment above a café in Paris 8, the eighth arrondissement, which was one of the numbered neighborhoods of Paris.

I wondered if the family I’d worked for still lived in the same area. It had been a swank apartment off the Avenue Montaigne. The girls, Vanessa and Alyssa, had been four and five when I’d been charged with their care, and we’d spent gorgeous autumn days roaming around the city parks, eating fresh bread and drinking thick hot chocolate, while I people watched and the girls ran out their wiggles in between their dance lessons, which had been many. Madame Beauchamp had loved the ballet, and nothing would have pleased her more than to have one of the girls pursue her dream.

Monsieur Beauchamp had worked long hours, and Madame Beauchamp had been a socialite, always busy with one glamorous event or another. I had been one in a parade of young women hired to care for the sisters until they were old enough to be sent to an elite boarding school in Switzerland. When I had expressed dismay to the housekeeper about the girls spending so little time with their parents, Madame Bernard had shrugged. This was how the children of the wealthy were raised. To me, it had felt so distant and cold. I’d tried my best to make my time with the girls as magical as I could. Jean Claude, charmed by my concern for the girls, had helped.

I remembered one day in particular, when we’d taken the girls on a picnic on the banks of the Seine. The sisters had worn matching dresses and tights, per usual. I did this not because I thought it was cute—although it was—but because I figured if I lost one child, all I had to do was look at the remaining one to know exactly what the missing one had been wearing. Thankfully, I’d never had to use this trick.

It had been early autumn at the time. The chestnut trees had been just turning gold, and to me, the day had felt like a postimpressionistic painting by Georges Seurat. I’d sat on the blanket with our food, watching Jean Claude and the girls run in the grass as he taught them how to fly kites, thinking what a wonderful father he’d make. He’d caught me watching him and winked, as if letting me know he knew what I was thinking. I’d blushed so hard, I’d feared I might pass out. That. That was the sort of feeling I wanted to feel again.

I hopped off the RER train at Châtelet–Les Halles and switched to the Metro line that would bring me into the Golden Triangle, the wealthy section of Paris made up of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, the Avenue Montaigne, and the Avenue George V, which was the beating heart for shoppers in Paris. It had been a long time since I’d navigated public transportation in the city, but it all came