My cousin’s voice spoke from a distant corner of my mind, made fainter from the effort of attempting to push past my pleasant thoughts with her more rational advice: That’s not a rabbit hole you want to tumble down.
But I was already some distance down that hole and falling ever faster. By the time we reached the first of the long tunnels and the motorcycle dived into the close embrace of the low-ceilinged arched walls with the long and steady line of lights that flashed past with the rhythm of a heartbeat, I was too far down the rabbit hole for saving. I leaned forward, wrapped my arms more tightly round Luc’s waist and, with my head turned sideways, let my helmet rest against the safety of his back. And went on falling.
* * *
Noah didn’t want to go to bed. Each night, except for New Year’s Eve, he’d gone upstairs at 9:15 without complaint, but now it was 9:43 and he was still downstairs wandering round from one room to the other; only this time he didn’t have his video game with him, so there wasn’t the synthesized music to serve as a warning, and when he came into my workroom it startled me.
Noah apologized, not bothering to try to speak in English. “I am looking for Diablo,” he explained. “I cannot find him.” He looked sad.
I’d always been puzzled when books about people with Asperger’s claimed that we didn’t have empathy. True, I might have trouble sometimes guessing how another person felt, but sadness was an obvious emotion and an easy one to spot most of the time. My problem wasn’t that I didn’t understand their feelings, only that I didn’t have a clue how to respond to them. I never knew the proper thing to do or say. I wasn’t good at comforting.
He said, “I thought he might be here, with you. He likes this room.”
“I haven’t seen him.” Which, considering Diablo was a cat, meant very little. Cats were good at hiding.
“Oh.”
I hesitated as I looked at Noah. He looked so sad. And he hadn’t interrupted me, not really. I’d just finished work on one of Mary’s entries in the diary and had set my pencil down to rest my hand a moment. She had not had much to say. The diary entry had been short and dull, a recap of her second trip to Mass, and I’d learned nothing from it other than that she had liked her new green gown. Mary hadn’t named the church they’d gone to this time, either, which at least had made me feel less guilty for not taking on the crowd of tourists at the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés this afternoon, because she might have never gone there. I was happy with the way I’d spent my time in Paris, anyway. So happy, to be honest, that my concentration wasn’t what it should be, and I found it easy now to set my work aside completely to help Noah take a look around the room. The cat, as I’d suspected, was not there.
I said, “He must be somewhere. Where else have you looked?”
His shrug was very French, a smaller mirror version of his father’s. “Everywhere. In all his favorite places. There is only the one room he likes upstairs, but I can’t go in there alone, not without a grown-up, and Maman is busy doing laundry and Madame Pelletier is in the bath.” His eyes were like his father’s, too, and fully as persuasive.
“I’ll come up,” I offered, which if not exactly comforting must still have been the right response, because he brightened.
“Truly?”
“Yes, of course.” I rose, and let him lead me out and up the winding stairway. As we climbed, I asked him, “Are you sure he’s even in the house? Perhaps he’s gone home to his owner.”
“You can’t own a cat. Cats don’t like to be owned.”
This was news to me. “No?”
Noah shook his head, certain. “Papa says that cats choose the people they want to be with; you can’t force them to stay if they don’t want to stay. And they only belong to themselves,” he said. “That’s why Diablo prefers to live here, because we understand that.”
“I see.” We were at the first floor, now, where my bedroom was, but we simply stepped round to the next flight of stairs and kept climbing. I hadn’t been up this far yet. It was my understanding Denise and her son had the attic suite on the third floor, while Claudine’s rooms were just above mine, but the second-floor room Noah led me to, although directly on top of my own and the same general shape and size, wasn’t a bedroom. When the light was switched on I saw cameras and tripods and lamps and reflectors; a sleek modern desk and a couple of stools and framed photographs everywhere, telling me this must be Claudine’s own workspace—her studio.
I paused on the threshold. “You’re sure you’re allowed to be in here?”
“If I’m with a grown-up.” He’d already entered the room and was moving around with the easy assurance of someone who knew it well, peering behind canvas backdrops and under the desk and in what I assumed were the cat’s favorite places. I wasn’t much help to him, mainly because I was busy admiring the photos that hung on the wall.
I had seen all the photographs Claudine had taken for Alistair’s books, of course, but those were landscapes and streetscapes and buildings, while these for the most part were portraits of people, some done in full color and some black and white. They were people I didn’t know—strangers—except for one man in a black-and-white image, caught halfway in shadow. A big man with dark hair turned gray at his temples.
There were at least three other portraits of Alistair Scott hung beside and below it, but this one attracted my eye because, while all the others were formal and posed, this one captured a quieter moment, more private. He seemed unaware of the camera. He sat in a chair by a window, its casement propped open to some sort of breeze that had lifted the simple sheer curtain and let in a soft slanting angle of light. He was reading, his head slightly bent to the paperback book that he held in one hand, while his other hand cradled the stem of a wineglass that still had some wine in it. There was a second glass, also half full, on the table set under the window beside him, as well as a second chair pushed back as though someone had only just stood and walked out of camera range. Or as if that person was the one taking the picture.