Chapter 88 The Last conversation

Chapter 88 The Last conversation

Daniel and I walked to Rosa’s street on the final morning.

Not planned. We had finished breakfast at the hotel and the family had dispersed into its various August morning activities, Noah conducting a final assessment of the Eiffel Tower from a distance with Damien, Eleanor and Catherine at a market, Serena and Victoria with the babies in a garden nearby. Daniel had appeared at my elbow and said simply come with me and I had gone.

The street was quiet.

The particular quiet of a Paris street in August that had been emptied of its residents and not yet fully occupied by anyone else. The buildings doing their patient thing, facades warm in the morning light, shutters open, the accumulated dignity of structures that had been here long enough to stop caring about being noticed.

We stopped outside a building I did not recognize.

“She lived here first,” Daniel said. “Before the bookshop apartment. When she arrived in ninety three.” He looked at the door. “Three months she was here. I came to help her move when she found something better.”

I looked at the building.

A perfectly ordinary Paris building.

Where Rosa Santos had arrived in nineteen ninety three with a portfolio and six months of savings and the seeing she had brought with her from New York and the decision she had made, somewhere between the rejections, to keep going regardless.

“She was happy here,” Daniel said. “I know that sounds strange given everything. The galleries saying no. The money running out. But she was happy.” He paused. “She used to say that Paris understood something about light that New York did not. That the light here had a different relationship with the things it fell on.”

I thought about the Paris paintings.

The particular quality of them that was distinct from the New York ones.

She had been right.

“She knew she was good,” Daniel said. “I want you to know that. She was not waiting for permission to believe in the work. She already believed in it completely. What she was waiting for was not validation. It was simply time.” He looked at the building. “She believed time would be sufficient. That eventually the work would find its room.”

“She was right,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “She was always right about the important things.”

We walked on.

Through the Marais streets in the morning light, moving without direction, the particular wandering of two people who had somewhere to be later and nowhere to be now and had decided to use the in between well.

“I want to tell you something,” Daniel said. “Before we go home. Before Paris is behind us again.”

“Tell me,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment.

“When your mother and I ended,” he said carefully, “I left. I have told you that. I have told you I was wrong and I was twenty eight and I could not admit it. All of that is true.” He paused. “What I have not told you is that I thought about coming back. Many times. Specifically when you would have been seven. And twelve. And seventeen.” He stopped. “Every time I thought about coming back I told myself it was too late. That I had missed too much. That arriving after so long would cause more damage than staying away.”

I walked beside him and listened.

“I was wrong about that too,” he said simply. “It was not too late at any of those times. It is not too late now. There is no such thing as too late as long as the person is still there and the willingness is still there.” He looked at me. “I lost twenty three years to the belief that I had already lost too much to try. I do not want you to ever believe that about anything. About anyone.”

I walked beside my father on a Paris street in August and held that.

The particular specific gift of a hard won lesson offered plainly.

“I know,” I said. “I learned it from watching everyone in this story try anyway. Eleanor and Damien. Marcus. Serena. You.” I paused. “Rosa Santos trying anyway every evening after the bookshop shift.”

He nodded.

“Keep going,” he said softly.

“Keep going,” I confirmed.

We walked back toward the hotel through the August morning.

At the corner of the street near the café, Daniel stopped.

“I want to ask you something,” he said. “And I want you to answer the way you answer things, which is honestly and without managing my feelings.”

“Ask,” I said.

He looked at me with Rosa Santos’s eyes, my eyes, Luce’s eyes, the seeing that had been traveling through this family for longer than any of us had known.

“Am I your father,” he said. “Not biologically. Actually. In the way that matters.”

I looked at this man.

At his careful hands and his careful question and the twenty three years he had spent believing it was too late and the year he had spent discovering it was not.

“You are becoming my father,” I said. “That is different from being my father. It is more honest.” I held his gaze. “You are becoming it every Sunday in the apartment. Every morning in Rosa’s apartment sitting with the work. Every time you hold Luce and tell her things about Paris that she cannot understand yet.” I paused. “You are becoming it. That is enough. That is more than enough.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he did something I had not expected.

He put his arms around me.

Not the careful tentative embrace of someone uncertain of their welcome. The complete certain embrace of someone who had decided and was done being tentative about the decision.

I put my arms around him.

We stood on a Paris street corner in August in the morning light and held on for a moment and the city moved around us entirely indifferent and entirely beautiful.

Then we went back to the hotel.

To the family waiting.

To the last day.

To the going home.

Which was, after everything, the direction we were always moving in.