Akin Read online

  “Did it freak you out?”

  Noah shook his head. “I never knew him without it.” One of those things a child took in his stride; adults were mysterious anyway. “Now, Selvaggio, Marc’s surname, that’s Italian. It sounds like salvage, but it’s actually from savage.” He improvised: “One of our ancestors on his side might have been nicknamed Michael the Wild.”

  A puzzled scowl. “You said you were from France.”

  “Well, Nice is a border town. Tossed back and forth between France and Italy for centuries.”

  The kid’s eyes slid away, toward the bedroom door.

  Noah yawned hugely. “You have everything you need?”

  A nod.

  “Goodnight, then.”

  Awake at 2 a.m.

  Hydrogen, helium. Lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. Fluorine, neon, Noah chanted silently. Back in Freshman Chem in the ’50s, they’d made everything into jingles, learning by heart the essential tools of their trade. Sodium, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, chlorine, argon. When Noah couldn’t sleep, in his mind’s eye he traced the top three rows of the beautiful battlemented castle. He could sing the names straight down, too: Hydrogen, lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, caesium, francium.

  No good; this litany wasn’t soothing him the way it usually did.

  Maybe because of the ticking time bomb across the hall, Joan whispered.

  While Noah had still been teaching, he’d occasionally taken an Ambien to get back to sleep, but he’d always hated the next day’s grogginess. He preferred to soldier on, with À la recherche du temps perdu on his e-reader. (He chose Proust because of how little story there was to hook his attention, and how fuzzily he grasped what the more obscure French words meant.)

  Instead Noah heaved himself out of bed. He crept into the spare room to check on Michael.

  Faint snores. In the light that spilled up from the street nine floors below, the kid was visible only above the jaw: round-cheeked, looking half his age. Noah thought of patting his shoulder, through the bedding, but held back in case of startling him awake.

  At 6:23 he woke again with a jerk. His shoulder ached as if he’d pulled a muscle in his sleep. These days everything hurt faintly, or sagged; the nerve endings in his soles prickled with little electric shocks when he got onto his feet. Crannies in Noah’s mouth where certain teeth used to be; bad breath; a permanently dripping nose; only the most theoretical, residual libido. There was nothing serious wrong with him but an iffy hip, though. His doctor was pushing the operation, but Noah didn’t think he’d bother, at this point.

  Top priority this morning was to make himself coffee.

  After that he went to the spare room and tapped on the door.

  The room was empty, the bed stripped. Noah stared. Like a hospital bed after someone had died. Had Michael run away in the night? Shit shit shit shit shit.

  Noah thundered down the hall. Ducked into the kitchen, the living room, even (briefly confused) into his own room. He trembled in the passage. He needed to call Rosa—and the police, he supposed?—but first he had to pee.

  He sat down on the toilet seat because he was shaking so much. The shower curtain was pulled across. Something was hung over the rail, dripping on the slatted wooden bathmat. Sheets? He washed his hands, then called, “Michael?”

  Nothing.

  Then, from the living room, “Uh-huh?”

  The boy was in the corner behind the door, in a sort of nest of the duvet and pillow. His Twenty Questions ball beeping in his hands.

  Noah dithered between Good morning and Hi for too long; ended up saying neither. “Have you been up for long?”

  A nod. Dark circles under the eyes.

  “Half the night?”

  Michael shrugged.

  How to measure time when you were awake and alone in some old guy’s spooky old apartment?

  “It can be hard to sleep in a new place.” Noah didn’t ask about the washed sheets. Too young for wet dreams, surely? Well, you never knew. He went off to the bathroom to squeeze them out before he forgot, and bundle them into the dryer.

  Shower and dress. It took Noah half an hour, these days; there were few things he couldn’t do at all, but he did nothing fast anymore. It wasn’t as if he was in any hurry.

  This Brooklyn school, P.S. whatever it was. Roughly ten miles away, but more like nineteen by Google’s recommended driving route, and an hour and seven minutes by subway. There and back to drop Michael off and pick him up again this afternoon, that meant the best part of five hours of Noah’s Tuesday. A travel day, too; he’d be worn out before he even got on that plane. If the passport turned up.

  When he went in to ask what Michael would like for breakfast, he found the boy slumped sideways onto the carpet, face on a curl of duvet.

  Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, balm of hurt minds. Lord knew this child could do with a bit of that.

  When the boy finally stumbled into the kitchen, he still had the duvet wrapped around him.

  “English muffins? Cheese? Muesli?”

  Michael shook his head, raccoon-eyed.

  “Good-quality food” and all that. “You have to have something,” Noah said. “You didn’t have any dinner.”

  “There’s stuff at school.”

  Noah peered into the refrigerator. The end of a packet of sliced bread. “Toast?”

  A yawn seized Michael. “’Kay.”

  “Oh, and eggs—what about some eggs?” The packing date on the carton read JA 25, but Noah knew they were perfectly safe for four weeks after that.

  The kid shook his head and climbed onto the second stool.

  Joan’s stool. Not that Noah said so. He put the bread in the toaster and laid out the butter, a plate, and a knife. Poured a glass of milk. Did kids need dairy for their growing bones, or was that a myth promulgated by the agricultural lobby?

  “It’s brown,” Michael said when he saw the toast.

  It seemed self-evident, but Noah responded gamely. “Mm, that’s a Maillard reaction. Above 285 degrees, the sugars in the bread caramelize and pyrolyze—they break down into little chunks like charcoal.”

  “No, but it’s brown, dude.”

  “Oh, you mean whole-wheat bread—yes, it is.” Clearly it wasn’t just rich kids who were picky. Noah drained his lukewarm coffee.

  Michael was hacking at the butter. “And what’s up with your butter?”

  “It’s just cold.” All year round in this building the choice was refrigerator-hard or a rancid puddle. Noah could spread the butter on the despised brown toast himself…but that would be babying the boy. “Did yours come in a tub? At your grandma’s? If so, it wasn’t butter, it was a spread—butter diluted with water and vegetable oils.”

  “Better than this shit.” Michael ground a wedge into the toast.

  He was just being loyal to his grandmother, Noah reminded himself. To his whole stolen life.

  The boy pulled out his phone and was soon immersed in a silent game.

  Terrible manners, but if Noah said “Put that away,” he—as well as Michael—would be forced to make conversation.

  When the toast was gone, Noah asked, “Do you need a bag lunch?”

  “There’s a canteen.”

  “Money for the canteen, then?”

  A tiny pause, before Michael said, “Nah, I eat free.”

  Noah was impressed that the kid hadn’t just accepted the cash. “You have your books?”

  The shake of the head could mean either that the school required none or that Michael didn’t have his.

  Noah found he didn’t care enough to ask—not today, at least. “What do you use for a bag?”

  “My backpack.”

  “OK. Then everything you don’t need today, leave here.”

  The boy looked suspicious.

  “It’ll be perfectly safe.” Nobody comes in but the cleaner once every two weeks, Noah almost added, but that sounded aristocratic. “Go brush your teet
h.”

  No answer. Which could mean either I don’t need telling or Fuck you. Michael went off down the hall.

  Noah called after him, “I presume school starts at nine?”

  “Eight-oh-five.”

  “No!” He checked his watch, gnawed his lip. How had the time run away with him? “That seems horribly early.”

  “It’s a renewal school.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Gotta go an extra hour a day because we’re dumb.” The bathroom door closed.

  Noah should have countered that, but he was already online, checking whether they could get there any faster in a cab. No. Damn it! Late, the very first time.

  A surge of ruthlessness. Noah went and knocked on the bathroom door. “Michael, would you mind missing one more day of school?”

  A hollow laugh.

  Great, Noah was sliding into absenteeism already. Set that against one measly point for getting whole-wheat toast into the kid.

  If the school called, he’d say Michael was suffering from exhaustion due to bereavement.

  Noah decided to enjoy the fact that at least he wasn’t on the L train right now. He leaned out his front door to collect today’s New York Times from the sisal mat, and read it at the kitchen counter. A long article about this year’s commemorations of the end of World War One. (Noah found it incongruous when people said “celebration.”) The last surviving combatant, from the Women’s Royal Air Force, had lasted right up until 2012. Noah also learned that Britain had formally pardoned the more than three hundred WWI deserters it had shot at dawn. He supposed people were more forgiving of qualms and panics nowadays, more fascinated by the traumatized victim than the hardy hero. He thought of Marc’s hand; he hadn’t been the Six Million Dollar Man, but he had gotten by.

  Insurance policies specified a lump sum for each limb, didn’t they? Which reminded Noah: he’d better call his company to get Michael added to his travel and medical coverage as a temporary dependent.

  But after being kept on hold for twenty minutes, as he worked away at one corner of the crossword, he abandoned the attempt for now.

  He found himself looking up stats on Michael’s school. Percentage of free-lunch recipients, suspensions, new speakers of English, bullying, state math and reading scores, rates of attendance (that gave him a twinge of guilt). What shocked him most was the percentage of students living in shelters. How could you do your homework if you didn’t even have a home to work in?

  Then he tried “travel France kids.” Much unhelpful advice along the lines of “Strap your baby to your chest and tackle the Louvre super-early.” For teens, it kept recommending “Bribe them with delicious ice cream.”

  French parenting seemed to be all the rage, at least among American book-buying women enthralled by the fact that Gallic kids could sit up straight at the dinner table through four courses. Noah tried to remember: had he retained this skill after he’d come to New York at four?

  He read up on the concept of the pause—how French mothers waited a few minutes before picking up crying babies, to give them a chance to settle themselves. (Or perhaps to teach them not to expect instant gratification?) He couldn’t recall his little sister crying much at all. He wondered if Margot had slid into indulgent, Anglo-Saxon ways for her second go at motherhood, after the war. Had she felt bad at all about the two-and-a-half-year pause when she’d stayed away from her son?

  That was cruel. But those small photos he’d come across in Fernande’s box—only three days ago, was it?—they’d unsettled him.

  Noah went into his room and got them out for another look. That one of a poseur with a cane. (No, that wasn’t fair; it had been as common for a stylish man to sport a cane in the 1940s as it was to wear sunglasses today.)

  Though Margot had often mentioned Nice—her childhood, and youth, and early days of marriage—she’d never said much about the time she’d spent with her father, without husband and child, during the war. Shouldn’t those years have been the most interesting? Refugees flooding in, then the Italian army, then the Germans…Noah had always assumed she preferred to forget. But if the images in the envelope were from that period, then for all their obscure subjects and shoddy aesthetic, they hinted at preoccupations of his mother’s unknown to Noah. A time in her life to which it seemed he’d been only a footnote.

  It struck him now that the cane might have been a matter of need for that man, just as for Margot herself, after the war. (She’d hurt her knee in a fall.) So many things could have stunted the gait back then: different-length legs, a club foot. Noah considered the silhouetted face; a certain tightness and fatigue, suggesting chronic pain? On the other hand he was chic, as if he might break into the tap routine from Singin’ in the Rain at any moment. Who was this dandy? And why had Noah’s mother treasured a picture of him all through her married life?

  He paused next at the cropped shot of the frilly building that looked like a hotel. A closed, arched door, with elegant moldings and wrought-iron balconies; four rows of windows. Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée.

  Which reminded him to put down the old photos and email the Hotel Belle Vue (“a gracious souvenir of the Jazz Age Riviera,” according to its website, “mere minutes from the legendary Promenade des Anglais”) to add a bed for Michael. Noah’s first impulse was to ask for a second room, no matter the expense, but then he remembered the boy might drink miniatures from the minibar, electrocute himself by dropping the hair dryer in the bath, abscond. So Noah added Enfant 1 to his room reservation and asked for two lits jumeaux (twin beds) instead of the double he’d specially requested before. “Je serai accompagné par mon petit-neveu.” Was that right for “I’ll have my great-nephew with me”? Perhaps the English word should be grandnephew instead of great-nephew. Both sounded implausible to Noah, somehow; foreign.

  His French was badly rusty now; he’d barely used it in the quarter-century since his mother’s death, and even before then it had been a matter of one-sided conversations in which Margot had addressed him in French and he’d disappointed her by lapsing into English.

  If by any chance the Belle Vue didn’t have a room with twin beds, he typed, could the child please be provided with a…cot, or camp bed, or rollaway. How did you say that? “Lit d’enfant,” he wrote, as an umbrella term for child’s bed.

  Michael, in the doorway. His T-shirt said SERVER STATUS: OFFLINE.

  How long had he been standing there? Noah wasn’t used to having to close his own door for privacy. “I like your shirt. Does it mean asleep or just zoned out?”

  A shrug for an answer. Michael eyed the walls, the Tiffany bedside lamp, the window blinds, the bare hardwood floor. (Noah was determined not to be one of those seniors who began their decline by tripping on a rug.) “Are they by the famous guy?”

  Noah looked where he was pointing, at the photos on the bed. “Père Sonne? No, no. It’s a bit of a puzzle, actually. I think my mother took them, in the ’40s, but I don’t know why.”

  Michael held up his phone. “Me and my friends take random pics all the time.”

  “But film was expensive back then, so people usually thought before they clicked.” He held up the one of a woman with her hair up, snapped from behind, and the one of the empty street. “Also she printed them, and brought them with her to America”—when there was so much she must have had to leave behind—“and held on to them for half a century.” Boring old dead people: he could tell he was losing Michael. “This building, for instance,” Noah added, “I just wish I knew what it was.”

  “Have you googled it?”

  “What would I look up?” he asked, sarcastic. “‘Building, probably in Nice’?”

  “Googled the actual pic.” Michael poked it with a finger.

  Noah used the edge of his chenille bedcover to rub the print off the surface. “Sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Just scan it in and hit Search, old man.”

  Noah stared. Why hadn’t on
e of his students mentioned that such a thing was possible? (He was reminded of the first time he’d put together a bibliography on a PC—around 1988, this would have been—and how he’d painstakingly cut and pasted all the titles into alphabetical order by author before Joan told him that the computer could do that with one command.) “Really? I must find a scanner right away.”

  Michael grunted with annoyance. He held the photo against the white wallpaper and snapped it with his phone. Tapped in a few words, then held his screen out: “Best guess: Hotel Excelsior Nice.”

  Flabbergasted, Noah grinned. “You’re a genius.”

  “Nah, you’re a dumb-ass.”

  He couldn’t disagree.

  After the boy wandered off, Noah looked up the Hotel Excelsior. It hadn’t been knocked down yet, this elegant, cream, 1890s terraced palace.

  This four-star boutique hotel’s restful atmosphere belies its location in the beating heart of Nice’s Musicians’ Quarter just 3,117 feet from the famous Promenade des Anglais and 493 from the Train Station. The quirky decor of its different 42 rooms with travel inspired wall murals recall the Excelsior’s roots as a coaching inn purveying recuperation for nobles and their horses.

  He was amused by the specificity of the distances and the creakiness of the English.

  On the hotel’s own website, a last-minute Carnival deal: just one Comfort Suite still available. He canceled the Belle Vue and booked this one.

  For lunch he took the boy out to buy supplies in a deli around the corner. Michael seemed overwhelmed by the variety, so Noah offered him the plainest of options: ham, white bread. “What fruit would you like?”

  Michael shook his head.

  “Come on, what about grapes? Lovely and sweet.”

  “’Kay.”

  “What do you think of the Upper West Side?” Noah ventured to ask as they were walking back with their paper bags.