After she’s taken four or five shots, she stops and looks at the camera. I can tell by the way she’s staring at it, running her finger along its edges, that this small cardboard box contains so much more than a few images of the two of us on an undeveloped strip of film. It’s not a memory or a postcard, it’s more than she’s ever had—tangible proof that we exist together, outside both her world and mine.
“Bennett?” she says, still looking down at the camera.
“Yeah.”
“Are we going back home tonight?” When her eyes find mine, I shake my head no.
Her gaze travels up to the brightly lit iron beams above us, and a grin spreads across her face. “I never thought I’d be standing on the Eiffel Tower and saying this but…can we get out of here?”
16
Clouds are filtering the morning sun but it’s still bright enough to stir me from sleep. I rub my eyes as I take in the unfamiliar room, remembering little by little where I am right now. In Paris. With Anna.
She’s sitting in the window ledge, her bare legs bent and visible below the hem of one of my T-shirts. Her chin is resting on her knees and she’s staring out the window at the city below.
I kick off the covers and cross the room. “What are you doing way over here?” I pull her hair to one side and kiss the back of her neck.
“I couldn’t sleep.” She’s quiet for a few seconds, and then she says, “I keep having to remind myself that this is all happening. That I’m actually here.”
“Then we should get going. We have a whole day in Paris and we still won’t come close to seeing everything.”
Anna turns her head and gives me the biggest smile. And then she sits up straighter and spins in place, wrapping her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck. “I didn’t mean Paris. I meant here, with you.”
We grab coffees at the café downstairs and make a game plan. We decide to skip the obvious sights, the museums and cathedrals and monuments, but agree that we can’t miss the Seine, so we order our pain au chocolat to go and head toward the river. We find a place to sit on the bank, and Anna pops a chunk of bread into her mouth. She closes her eyes, letting the dough and chocolate melt on her tongue.
“God, that’s incredible. Why can’t we make bread that tastes like this?”
“You and me?” I joke and she stares at me.
“Americans.”
“Oh. Because we aren’t French,” I say matter-of-factly.
She tears off another chunk of bread and pops it into my mouth, presumably to shut me up.
We spend the rest of the morning wandering around aimlessly, meandering down the smallest alleys we can find, popping into bakeries when they smell too good to simply walk past. Anna stops at a corner store that appears to sell everything from drinks to cheesy Parisian trinkets, and heads for the cooler. She grabs two bottles of water and tosses one to me.
The clerk is ringing us up when Anna sees a display on the counter. “Ah, here you go.” She hands me a laminated map. “This is what we need,” she says, tapping the surface.
I take it from her hand and slip it back into the rack where it was. “We don’t need a map.”
“Why not?” She looks confused at first, but then her face falls. “How many times have you been to Paris?”
“Twice. Both times for concerts, and I barely even walked around the city.” Anna waits patiently for a better explanation. “I just prefer to get lost.”
She raises her eyebrows and stares at me. “You want to get lost? In Paris?”
“It’ll be fun.”
She looks unconvinced. She might also look a bit terrified. So I grab the map from the rack and set it down on the counter. “Fine. We’ll get a map. But it’s purely for backup.”
The cashier gives us the total but I hold my hand up in the air and tell her to wait. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.” Anna cocks her head to the side, and gives me a Haven’t we already covered this? expression, but I laugh under my breath and take off anyway.
I have to snake around a few aisles, but I finally find a small section of bike accessories, and that’s where I find the padlocks. I return to the counter, using a little sleight of hand to keep it hidden from her view.
“Here,” I say as I take my backpack off and hand it to Anna, along with the map. “Find an extremely inconvenient pocket for that, would you?” While she’s busy with the zipper, I remove the padlock and its key from their packaging, and slip them into the front pocket of my jeans.
I look at her and say, “Now we have a destination.”
“We do?”
“Yeah. I want to show you something.”
“Do you need the map?” She smiles.
I look at her and shake my head. “No, I do not need the map.”
I may need the map. We’ve been walking along the banks of the river for a good forty minutes, and we keep passing bridges, but so far, I haven’t seen the sign that marks the one I need. I give myself one more bridge before I fold. Then I spot it: a dark green sign with white type that reads PONT DES ARTS.
The pedestrian-only footbridge is more crowded than I expected it to be. Couples are sitting on the benches in the center and people are clustered in groups along the railings. Everyone seems to be speaking French.
I find a spot against the railing and sit down. I lean back against a post and Anna sits between my legs. Just as she’s reclining against my chest, a police siren blares by and fades away. “I love how even the most common sounds remind you that you’re somewhere else,” she says.
We’re quiet for a long time, looking out over the water, until Anna twists her neck and looks up at me. “I’ve been dying to ask you something,” she says. I must be wearing an affirmative expression because she suddenly spins around to face me and looks me right in the eye. “When you stopped the fire, did you feel the same way you did after we changed things with Emma?”
Her question catches me off guard and I react by dodging it. “I didn’t stop the fire. I changed a few things leading up to the fire. Big difference.” But Anna stares at me, not letting me off the hook.
I look at her, remembering how I sat in my room that night, picturing the look on Anna’s face when she first saw Emma, unbroken. “Before, during, or after?” I ask.
“All of the above.” She reaches out for the hem of my shirt and plays with it, running her finger back and forth along the edge.
I start to fall back on the things I say when I don’t want to let people in: simple words like “fine” and “good” that slip so easily off my tongue. But instead, I feel myself lean in a little closer, like I’m ready to tell her everything.
“Before? Scared,” I say flatly. “When you asked me to go back and help Emma, I honestly didn’t think I could do over that many days, and even if I could, I had no idea if it would work. Anything could have happened. We could have been knocked back right away. Or we could have changed the sequence of events, but the car accident might have happened a few hours later regardless. The number of things that could have gone wrong were just…” I trail off, shaking my head.
“I thought Emma would be the first and last time I’d ever do anything like that. But when I heard what happened to those kids, I guess I just wanted to try it again. I mean, if could go back two days, why not three? And if it did work, if I could change it… Still, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t terrified the entire time.”