Friendship Makes the Heart Grow Fonder (12 page)

 “Look, there’s another placard.” Judy slid away. “I’ll translate.”

 “I want to get a photo of this sepulchral lamp.” Monique fiddled with her camera. “But without a flash the only way it’s
going to work is if I change the exposure time. You know, I should have just taken my digital camera instead of fussing with
this.”

Monique pressed various buttons, a little tiny bluish glow indicating the brightness of the camera screen. Becky stood halfway
between her two friends, feeling slightly unmoored. Judy was only a few steps away, mumbling French under her breath. Monique
was still standing on the opposite side, an arm’s length away, if Becky was assessing the distance of that blinking little
blue blob of light correctly.

Don’t be a freakin’ wimp.

They were in tunnels, for goodness sake. Yeah, she was standing alone like a cork bobbing in the middle of a dark sea, but
her friends could certainly see her. She would just stand here and face a vague yellow smear of light, and pretend as if she
could actually
see
what it was illuminating, while waiting patiently.

“Où est-elle la Mort?”
Judy, to her right, spoke aloud. “Where is Death?
Toujours future ou passée.
”

To her left Monique mumbled, “I have no idea if this is going to work.”

“I think that means ‘always in the future or in the past,’” Judy mused.
“A peine est-elle presente…”

Becky closed her eyes. The smear of yellow light winked out and everything was in blackness. It calmed her somehow. It gave
her the illusion that if she opened her eyes she’d actually see something more.

“…
que deja elle n’est plus
. Well that’s complicated. I think it means ‘as soon as death is here, she’s gone.’ Huh.” Judy shifted her weight in the darkness.
“Why is death feminine, anyway? I never did understand that.”

With her eyes still closed Becky conjured in her mind the castles and cathedrals and beautiful buildings she’d seen since
they’d arrived in Paris. She focused for a while on the castle of Vincennes. Brian’s birthday was in June. She would make
him that castle. She’d leave space between the outer walls and the tall inner keep so he could slip his knights into formation,
along with some of Brianna’s plastic cows and sheep and goats for the courtyard. Even the knights have to eat. She pondered
how she could re-create the ochre color of the stones.

Becky became aware of more tourists flooding into this section of the tunnels. Brisk little eddies of air brushed past her.
She smelled the sudden scent of perfume. A backpack bumped against her shoulder. Startled she stumbled forward a little and
then froze, balancing on the balls of her feet.

Vertigo, swift and sudden, a mental plunge into an abyss.

Becky blinked her eyes open and forced herself down to the flat of her soles. She told herself to calm down. During the day,
if she got knocked by somebody, she’d try to adjust her motion or her stance to avoid any more collisions. But in the darkness
her first reaction was paralysis. She knew this place was riddled with underground caverns, hidden aquifers, and a maze of
quarry tunnels not officially opened to the public. Tourists milled around her like bees in a small part of the hive. Becky
listened for Judy, but there were a lot of folks reading French. She turned her head toward where Monique had been—or, at
least, where she thought Monique had been—but saw no glowing blue blob. A bunch of kids suddenly swarmed near her, dissolving
into giggling little gasps.

She said, “Monique?”

No response. A German couple slipped up beside her, chatting comfortably. She slid her foot across the floor and sidled away
from them. Another group came up behind her. She wondered if she were standing in front of something worthy of notice. She
blinked and blinked and blinked, but whatever it was, it was not lit well, not even by the little spotlights that ran along
the walls.

She spoke more loudly. “Judy?”

She told herself they couldn’t be far. There was a haze of yellow light toward her right. A spotlight like many of the others,
so it was likely attached to a wall. If she headed toward it maybe the light would help her orient herself in this room. Maybe
she could catch the sight of a unique, long-necked silhouette amid the shadows. Maybe Judy could better see her if she were
standing underneath the bulb.

She shuffled, keeping the soles of her sneakers flat on the ground. Shadows flickered past, startling her. Someone tried to
get by her, bobbing one way and then another in impatience before sighing and elbowing past. As discretely as she could she
stretched her arms out, hoping to find the edges of something—a wall, hopefully—rather than the sleeves of other tourists
or the soft hair of a child or the strap of a pocketbook, swiftly jerked back. Her heart started to trip over itself. She
widened her stance, dizzy in the dark.

“Monique?” She hated the edge of panic in her own voice. “Judy?”

That light was just ahead. She splayed her hands and jarred the butt of her palm against something smooth and icy, something
that tilted back. She flexed her fingers over it to make sure it was balanced and wouldn’t fall and shatter into a thousand
pieces. Her thumb slipped through a hole to the ridges inside it.

A hush in a child’s voice, somewhere behind her. “Mum, is she allowed to touch that?”

She jerked her hand back. She knocked her knuckles on something stony, the edge of a niche in the wall or a pillar, something
sharp enough to graze a layer of skin. She stumbled in the opposite direction and slammed into someone who grunted and dropped
something that clattered on the ground, a spinning circle of light. She tried to apologize but her words came out garbled
as she fought to breathe.

In her chest her heart pounded pounded pounded. She found the flat of a damp slick wall and she pressed herself up against
it, cheek to the chill. Her head felt light, so light, like it would rise up from her shoulders and float away.

She had a dim sense of a hand curling over her arm.

“Madame?”

“Breathe, Becky.”

Becky clutched a fistful of Monique’s yoga pants, stumbling in her wake. Her heart still raced in her chest. It didn’t help
that she was speed-walking through the tunnels on bruised knees and rubbery legs, twisting and turning following a path she
couldn’t see. She concentrated on lifting her feet with exaggeration so she wouldn’t catch the edge of her sneaker on an uneven
surface or a random stone. She wanted to stop and suck in a lungful of air, but she wanted to race away from her shame more.

“Beck,” Monique repeated,
“breathe.”

“I’m trying.” She focused as Monique had ordered, drawing deep breaths as she plowed forward. “I…just…don’t understand…what
happened to me.”

She’d found herself kneeling on the ground, with a guard gripping her upper arm and talking into his walkie-talkie. She didn’t
understand a word of French but she’d slowly come to understand that people had gathered, staring. She’d dug her fingers into
the grit of the floor so she wouldn’t lose consciousness.

“You had a panic attack.” Monique’s pace was unforgiving. “It used to happen all the time in the ER. A guy would come in gray
as paste clutching his chest, and everyone thinks it’s a heart attack. But if they’d talked to the guy for five minutes, they’d
find out he’d just been fired, or his wife asked him for a divorce, or he’d just been diagnosed with something nasty. Like
retinitis pigmentosa.”

Waves of shame washed over her. She’d been frightened in the dark before. Tripping over Brianna’s bike left in the middle
of the driveway as she tried to drag the garbage out to the sidewalk on a Sunday night. Trailing her fingers against the car
on the way back to guide her to the back stairs, sixteen steps beyond the end of the azalea bush. This hadn’t felt like that.
This had felt like she’d been trapped in a tiny closet and seized by the throat until she lost consciousness.

“I thought you were right there, Becky.” Judy panted right behind her, half running to keep pace. “I thought you were right
beside me. And then you
weren’t
, so I thought you went ahead with Monique.”

“You were with me.” Monique veered to the left and then centered again, and Becky felt the splash of water as she stumbled
into a puddle. “You were there, with me, and then the crowd came, and I tried to get that stupid picture of the sepulchral
lamp before someone rushed in front of my camera. When I looked up you just weren’t there anymore.”

“Monie and I were two chambers over,” Judy said, for the tenth time, “before we realized we’d lost you.”

“I looked for you.” Monique’s voice was tight. “I scanned the whole room before I went to the next one. I don’t know how I
didn’t see you there.”

“For goodness sake,” Judy exclaimed. “How many miles is this place? That guard said it was not even a kilometer to the exit.”

 “And you, Judy.” Monique twisted a little; Becky felt the shift of Monique’s spine against the knuckles of her hand. “You
told us you couldn’t speak French anymore.”

“I don’t.”

“What the hell was that, then, you babbling to the guard? Were you speaking in tongues?”

“I just told him she was blind.
Aveugle.
I didn’t think I knew that word. It popped right into my head.”

“It wasn’t one word. You were having a whole conversation.”

“He wanted to call in medics. I told him you were a nurse. It was all present tense, French one-o-one.”

“You couldn’t step in while we were in Luxembourg when I was talking to that guy at the counter, trying to find the platform
for our train connection?”

“You did fine.”

“Or at the Metro this morning, asking for directions to the Château de Vincennes?”

“The French always answer me back in English.”

“So?”

“That’s Parisian for ‘your French sucks, lady, so please stop torturing my language.’”

“Tonight you’re the one calling the airline to make sure our flight to Zurich is on time.”

“Sure, if you want me to screw it up. Oh, damn it.” Judy groaned as they took another sudden corner. “More freakin’ stairs.”

Monique didn’t pause. She took a little leap up the first step. “How are you doing, Beck? We’re almost out.”

It couldn’t be soon enough. The air was sticky. It was hard to draw in, harder to push out. Becky flailed with her free arm
until she felt the slick wall against her fingers. The stairs had high risers. She stumbled on the first, but Judy was right
behind her, steadying her with two hands on the small of her back.

“If you fall, Beck, we’re all falling together,” Judy said. “And it ain’t going to be pretty, the three of us a pile of old
bats at the bottom.”

Monique tugged on the waistband of her yoga pants. “And I’d like to keep my pants on, thank you very much.”

They ascended the stairs, brisk but steady. She vaguely remembered something about there being eighty-four steps down or one
hundred and sixteen up, she couldn’t remember which or whether that memory was from reading about the catacombs or about the
stairs to the tower of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. She just wanted to
see.
She wanted to drink with her eyes all the light she could. She wanted to shake this panicky sense of choking, of being locked
in darkness.

 “Go on ahead.” Judy abruptly let go of the tail of Becky’s jacket. “I have to rest my knees a minute. I’m right behind you.”

When Judy let go, it was like shedding a weight dragging her back into the tomb. Monique was a steady, strong climber leaning
forward and Becky put her trust in her. She fought down her irrational anxiety that she’d never find her way out of this place.
The sweat coming out on her was hot now, not the cold dank sweat that burst all over her skin but the kind that pooled and
fell down her spine, the kind that made wet spots just beneath her breasts.

“Can you see it, Becky?”

She glanced up and saw a little vertical strip of brightness, like a crack in the ceiling of the world.

“Steady,” Monique said, as Becky’s toe slipped off the edge of the stair. “Almost there now.”

Almost there.

Becky sucked in a deep breath. She smelled car exhaust. From above came the muffled rhythm of footsteps, a burble of language,
and a muted jingle of a bicycle bell.

“Judy?” Monique called over her shoulder. “You all right down there?”

Judy’s voice, from deep below, was pained. “I’m at half speed. Don’t worry, I’ll see you outside.”

Then the stairs ended abruptly. Monique swung the doors open to bright light. Becky blinked and the room came into focus.
Monique swung her daypack onto a table, where a guard in a black polo shirt searched it. A pile of bones lay in a box by his
side. Becky gave over her own backpack and then, abandoning it, strode through the doors that led to the street.

She stood in the middle of the sidewalk as people streamed around her. She dropped her head back and blinked up to the cloudy
sky. She watched the flight of a bird. She blinked and blinked, taking in the soar of a streetlamp, the six stories of building,
the wrought-iron railings across every window, the geraniums hanging limp from a few. She took in the tiny cars zipping across
the roads. A jingle as a man walked by, playing with the keys in his pocket, a red scarf flapping about his neck. She walked
out of the crowd to the edge of the sidewalk, wishing she could get drunk on this light.

“You don’t look so good, Beck.”

Monique sidled up beside her with both packs in her hand. Becky didn’t want to look at her. Fear pulsed through her whole
body. The terror she’d tried to tamp down all these weeks battered in her throat. She couldn't do this anymore. She couldn't
pretend everything was going to be all right.

Abruptly she turned to Monique. She watched two lines deepen between her friend’s brows. Becky had been a fool, thinking she
could keep the truth from Monique. Those hazel eyes knew everything.

The words lurched out of her. “How long have you known?”