The Book That Matters Most (12 page)

He was worried about her, she knew that. Worried about how she was taking it, the way their family fell apart so fast. She exasperated him, but Maggie knew she was his favorite person on earth.

Another email popped up.

PS I'm not sure exactly where in Florence you are staying, but Osteria de' Benci is conveniently located on the eponymously named Via de' Benci!

“Will,” Maggie said to the screen. “Stop trying so hard.”

Ever since their parents separated, Will had grown even more protective of her, as if his love and concern could fill in for the gaping hole in their lives. Her brother had always loved their last name—Tucker. It had made him feel safe, Tucker, like being
tucked in. Now, she knew, he felt the opposite, tossed about, turned upside down. So did she.

She thought she heard Julien's key in the lock, and quickly turned off the computer.

If Julien didn't come to the apartment for several days, she could only think of how much she wanted to get high. One evening, her nerves grew so edgy that she left the apartment and went to Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain. She had not been there since she'd met Julien, and this time she had on a beautiful black knit dress from Agnès B. and textured hose and her chunky-heeled Mary Janes. This time she had money in her purse, because Julien always left her euros, thick stacks of them.

She ordered oysters and a carafe of
vin maison
. She opened her little notebook and wrote a Hemingway quote that she half-remembered:
As soon as I ate the oysters, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and make plans
. Just writing those words settled her somewhat. She turned the page and wrote the number 1. She would make plans, like Hemingway. Beside the number 1, she wrote:
Write every day
. This was a good start. Writers wrote every day, she knew that. Hemingway wrote every morning. Her oysters arrived, and her wine. She stared at the number 2 she'd written. Then she wrote:
Tell Julien to stop bringing the little pipe
.

Instead of going home, Maggie walked past the apartment, past the Bastille, up rue du Faubourg-du-Temple, to the scruffy part of Canal Saint-Martin. Maybe she would see a cozy bar and she would step inside, have a brandy, make more plans. But her gaze as she walked did not settle on any of the little bars ahead. Instead, she searched for someone who might be standing in the shadows, someone who might help her. It didn't take long. She saw a man,
tall, lean, in a leather jacket, dark hair over the collar, eyes narrowed, watching.

She slowed.

He saw her slow. He said something low, under his breath.

Maggie turned to him. He beckoned her with his hand, as if to say, quick, quick.

She stepped into the shadows with him.

His French was terrible and he smelled like fried food. He pressed something into her hand, a ziplock bag with white powder inside. But Maggie shook her head, her body tingling with anticipation.

“I don't know how to do it,” she said.

“It will cost you more,” he said.

She was nodding, that feeling of bursting through her skin building.

He walked away and she followed him, down that dark alley, down another. “Be careful,” her mother had told her at the airport when she left. “Don't do anything dumb. Please.” A maze of rights and lefts, garbage in the street, the smell of urine, until finally they went through a door, up a dimly lit stairway, into a dimly lit room. Maggie laughed to herself, thinking of the Hemingway title
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
. She had arrived at the very opposite of such a place. The room stank of unwashed bodies and garbage. She thought of home, not the loft on the rue Saint-Antoine, but home, where her mother cooked elaborate meals, like coq au vin or risotto, sending the warm smells of spices throughout the house. She heard her mother—
Did you wash your hands before you sat down to dinner?

A boy smiled at her. “Welcome to hell,” he said in an American accent.

“Oh no,” she said. “I'm just getting a little something here. I live in the Marais. With my boyfriend.”

The boy's eyes were glassy. He said, “I'm from New Hampshire. Junior year abroad.”

“I used to go skiing in New Hampshire,” she said politely.

The man reappeared. He had a length of rubber hose and a needle and syringe. Gruffly he picked up her arm and began tapping her vein.

“No!” Maggie said. “I don't do that.”

The boy from New Hampshire laughed. “Then why are you here?”

The man's fingers pressed into her flesh.

“To get high,” Maggie said, suddenly feeling frightened. She'd heard of these places, shooting galleries. This was where drug addicts came.
Ma petite camée
, he'd said.

“To smoke it,” she finally managed to say.

“Alors,”
the man said, dropping her arm.

“It's so much better the other way,” the American told her. “You have no idea.”

Maggie licked her lips.

“I snorted it, back at school,” he said. “This is like a whole new level of great.”

“You sound so American,” she said.

“You know what?” the boy said. “We can go back to my apartment and I'll do it with you. That will be better than here.”

“This place is pretty bad,” she said.

“I live nearby. On the Place Sainte-Marthe.”

“Okay,” she said hesitantly.
Don't do anything dumb. Please
.

The boy stood. He wasn't very tall, and he was thin, his jeans sagging at his butt. He spoke to the dark-haired man who had
brought her here, and gave him a pile of money. The man went into another room, then came back with a paper bag that the boy took from him.

“Let's go,” he said, taking Maggie's hand like they were on their first date.

“God,” she said, “I'm glad to be out of there. Thanks.”

The night air was surprisingly warm and pleasant, and walking like this, holding the boy's hand and strolling past boutiques and cafés, she almost felt normal. Except that hunger gnawing at her, aching for what he had in that paper bag.

He told her his name was Gavin, and that he went to Dartmouth. He told her he was majoring in French.

“The word for hummingbird,” she said. “Is it
colibri
?”

He laughed. “I have no idea.”

“I'm a writer,” Maggie said.

“Cool,” Gavin said, unlocking a big wooden door.

His apartment building smelled so good, like lemon cleanser and home-cooked dinner. Up two flights of steps, another door that he unlocked and politely let her enter first.

“Home sweet home,” he said.

It was neat and pretty, all blues and greens and wood.

Gavin rubbed his hands together. “Let's have some fun, shall we?”

Maggie watched him prepare the heroin.

“I know this sounds weird,” she said, her voice dry, “but I'm worried about shooting up.”

“You won't die or anything,” he said.

“No, no. I don't want to be addicted to it. I just like getting high, you know.”

He was nodding. “I do know. The thing is, you can use for eight
hours, and then as long as you take sixty-four hours off, you can go another eight hours without being addicted. It's like a scientific formula.”

“Really?” she said. Was that why Julien made her wait? Was that why he didn't come every day? He had said he was protecting her, and he was. She felt a sudden pang for him. She did love him.

Gavin said, “We should do this in the bathtub.”

“What?” she said.

“You might pass out. It can happen. I don't want you to get hurt.”

She thought of the times the drug had knocked her down.

“Okay,” she said.

In the small bathroom, he said shyly, “Take off your clothes.”

“I have a boyfriend,” she told him.

But he wasn't listening to her. She recognized the look on his face. All he wanted was what was in that baggie, not her.

She undressed quickly and climbed into the clawfoot tub. Gavin climbed in too. She could see his ribs, and the sight of them made her miss Julien's soft, doughy body.

Gavin scooted close to her, wrapping his legs around her waist, his semi-hard penis on her thigh.

“Ready?” he asked her.

She stretched out her arm and closed her eyes.

M
aggie found the café in the alley beside the doll hospital and the bookstore. The bookstore looked familiar, like a black and white picture she'd seen in a guidebook, or maybe at one of the kiosks along the Seine. No, she realized. It was Ganymede's, the one she'd tried to find when she first came to Paris. It hadn't gone
out of business after all. Even though it was cold, she sat outside. Her hand trembled as she lit a cigarette. The sun was bright but did not warm the cold February air. She ordered a large café au lait and eggs on toast.

She would have taken out her notebook, but she'd lost it. So she just sat, smoking her cigarette and watching the people who came and went. She didn't know if Julien had called, because she'd lost her phone too. Somewhere, between the man in the alley and the time with Gavin, she'd lost everything. She shuddered thinking about the weekend. How she puked for what seemed forever after he put the needle in her arm. How she'd loved the high anyway, and lay there in that tub in her own puke, so happily stoned she didn't even care.

At some point, Gavin turned on the shower and washed everything away, but he didn't remember to put the shower curtain in the tub and the bathroom flooded and they slipped when they tried to walk across the wet floor. At some point, they had sex. Then they were back in the tub, and she heard herself asking if the eight hours was up and Gavin telling her it was. At some point he left for class, and she got up on trembling legs, and dressed, and walked home, and changed her clothes and decided she had to make a plan. A new plan. A better plan. One she could stick to.

The doll hospital had a window of dolls' heads, stacked one on top of the other.

Maggie lit another cigarette, ate her eggs even though they made her queasy. Part of her new plan was to eat three meals a day.

She watched the people coming and going but none of them were the tour guide Noah from the Musée d'Orsay.

A gray-haired woman walked down the cobblestone alley, to the bookstore. She bent and lifted the heavy iron gate, revealing
two narrow windows of books. She unlocked the door, turned the “Closed” sign around so that it read “Open,” and disappeared inside. When Maggie finished her coffee, she gave up on Noah appearing and made her way across the cobblestones to the bookstore. Above the door, a sign read GANYMEDE'S in purple ink.

“Bonjour,”
Maggie said as she entered.

The bookstore smelled musty, like old books and yesterday's coffee and ink. Maggie stood in the doorway, inhaling, taking it in—the long narrow store, the crowded shelves, the owner with long silver hair in a braid down her back.

“I'm just looking around,” Maggie added when the woman didn't answer, forgetting to speak French.

The woman did not even glance at her.

“So look,” she said gruffly.

Maggie ran her hands over the spines of books that lined one wall. Signs handwritten with different-colored Sharpies marked the sections: “Big Fat Books.” “Banned Books.” “Written for Children But You'll Like Them Too” “Read These Again!”

Maggie took
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
from the “Written for Children But You'll Like Them Too” shelf, and sank onto a beat-up leopard beanbag chair. From time to time, the little bell above the door tinkled, and Maggie heard voices and footsteps and the sound of the old-fashioned cash register. But she didn't look up from the book. Not once.

PART FOUR

MARCH

“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up
of light and shadow.”

—
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy

Ava

Detective Hank Bingham sat at Ava's kitchen table, his navy blue jacket unbuttoned, a lighter blue button-down shirt beneath. For an older man—seventy? seventy-five?—he'd stayed fit. His waist was narrow above a worn brown belt with a monogrammed buckle. Ava didn't offer to take the jacket from him. She didn't offer him a cup of coffee either, though she held one in her hands. All she wanted was for him to go away.

“I'm not trying to upset you—” he began.

“Really? Walking back into my life after all this time? Bringing this up again?”

He looked sad, Ava thought. Maybe it was the job. Maybe dealing with death all the time did this to a person. She didn't feel any sympathy for him, even as she took in the mostly bald head with gray bristles, the dark heavy-lidded eyes. A general air of sadness, or maybe defeat, emanated from him. Ava could almost smell it.

“Do you remember that case back in the eighties—” he tried.

But Ava interrupted him.