The Missing Sister Page 7

  —and pause midstep. The circle with the fifty-eight inside it, the one in Angela’s planner, is the restaurant Seb means to take us to now. The 58.

  We take an elevator to the middle base of the tower. Inside the restaurant, glasses of wine are already waiting on the white tablecloth when we arrive, which explains the phone call Seb made in the cab. I shoot him a glance, and he grins. “They know me here.”

  The wine is tempting—it would relax me, loosen me up—but I say, “I’m good with water. Thanks.”

  “You sure?”

  Sunrays pass through the window and seem to make the wine glow. The memory of its crisp flavor, the delicious bite of aftertaste, returns to my mind unbidden. “Not a fan of wine,” I say.

  “Suit yourself.” He asks the waiter for a bottle of sparkling water. “Let us recommence. What about this agenda? This Nour friend whose birthday Angela celebrated?”

  I nibble on a hard crostini from the woven bowl on the table. The one clue I managed to find that seemed plausible—the numbers in the blog entry—led to a fast food joint. The mysterious number fifty-eight? Just a restaurant she probably visited with Seb. The catacombs visit was helpful in seeing what Angela devoted herself to, but there were no hints as to her traumatic last steps. Still, visiting Nour seems like a reach. Does one party with Angela a year ago make Nour a high-priority lead, especially with time running out before my flight? I open my mouth to dismiss Seb’s suggestion, then remember his devastated expression in the catacombs and check the urge. He just wants to know what happened to the woman he loved.

  Be nice. Be open. Be more like Angela, I tell myself. Pragmatic can still be nice.

  Seb peruses the menu, oblivious to my mental tug-of-war. “Are you hungry?”

  My stomach gurgles. “Starved.”

  “Angela always liked the salads here. Maybe you should try one.”

  Heat spreads across my cheeks. “Are you entertaining the idea that I’m my sister right now?” I aim for matter-of-fact, but my words sound flirtatious. He thinks she’s gone. How can he not want to believe I’m Angela?

  This is crazy. And messed up on so many levels. I should have suggested McDonald’s.

  Seb pauses to reflect. “Words cannot express how I miss her. When I first met you, I thought your resemblance was incredible. Now I’m beginning to believe two women could not be more different. Where one is analytical, the other breathes artistry. Monsieur?” He stops the nearest waiter. “Deux Calvados, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Calvados?” I ask.

  “A regional brandy from up north. Normandy. Angela loved it—it’s an aperitif. Traditional before the main course.” He speaks with energy, sounding almost Italian in the way his words string together. Round ears stick out against the close cut of his hair, like a little boy who hasn’t grown into them yet.

  The server sets down two miniature vases of liquid before I can reply. “I’m good, really.”

  Seb shrugs. “I understand. I hope you don’t feel I am pressuring you. This is merely a French lunch.” He offers a small smile.

  Raising my glass of water, I say, “To thinking like Angela. And finding her attacker.”

  “Santé.” Seb clinks my glass with his. We discuss our only thing in common: Angela. Her time in Paris has been productive—earning honors at the Sorbonne, making friends, taking up half marathons, discovering new restaurants. Each time Seb volunteers some detail about my sister I’m unaware of, a pang of guilt then regret stabs my ribs. We move on to discussing travel and places we’d like to visit. Seb says something that doesn’t translate well.

  “Now, what is caboodle? I don’t think we think it means the same thing.” I toss back the rest of my water. Seb sips his second Calvados. A shift change has occurred, and new faces in uniform populate the floor.

  “Not caboodle, Kabul.” Seb clears his throat. “My brother. He was stationed there in Afghanistan when he died. Chemical warfare was being used, both as a physical and moral tactic.” Seb turns his gaze to the window. “Worse . . . if it can get worse . . . I fear I disappointed him while he was abroad.” His shoulders hunch forward.

  Conversations seem to hush around us, as though in response to Seb’s confession. Emotion tightens my throat at the image he paints with his words: two brothers, separated by some of the most heinous, appalling acts this world can offer—not twins, but the closeness Seb seems to still feel for his brother could be a mirror to the love I have for my sister. Seeing him so heartbroken, years after his loss, jars loose some of the wall I’d built between us back in Angela’s apartment.

  Angela, where are you?

  “This is none of my business,” I say. “But whatever happened between you two, you have to forgive yourself. You know that, right? Your brother’s death is a tragedy. Not your fault.”

  “No, I know. Perhaps. I just would hate to have disappointed him in the end. My family’s opinion is very important to me. When I became a neurologist instead of a surgeon like my uncle, it did not go well. My uncle has never stopped telling me how disappointed he is.” Seb gives a clipped laugh. “So maybe I should care less about family.”

  “Maybe.”

  My thoughts are lingering on Seb’s morose expression, him staring out the window, recalling his brother’s death, when he raises his glass. “Then let us toast. To not seeking happiness in others’ opinions. To finding stability from within.”

  We exchange cheers. Sunlight shifts toward the tall buildings and museum along this side of the tower.

  “Shall we?” Seb rises, offering his arm to me.

  “Did we pay the bill?”

  A smile stops at his mouth. “Have you ever done a restau-baskets?”

  “Restaurant . . . basketball shoes. Dine and dash? Are you serious?”

  He doesn’t blink from my stare. I can’t tell whether he’s messing with me again. Shock pierces the relaxation I felt.

  Seb cracks into a grin. “Come, come. It was a joke. Here comes the server now. The look on your face!” He bursts into laughter, then pokes my side until I start to laugh, too.

  We descend in the elevator to the ground level after paying (he insists again), then he stumbles into the park, with me following. A pair of costumed sailors, the kind you take photos with along Hollywood Boulevard or Times Square, amble toward the river. Couples lie flat on their blankets, staring at the clear sky.

  “Man,” I groan.

  Seb plants himself on the wooden boards of a park bench. He pulls me into his lap. “Who?”

  “Whoa, hey—” Up close, creases mark the corners of his eyes—dark-blue spheres, rich in color. I’m suddenly more aware than I was even in the restaurant that he’s the kind of guy—scientific, serious—that I would usually fall for, not Angela. And is there a part of me—a small part—that would feel satisfaction if he chose me over Angela, or at least his memories of her?

  I stand, almost as if to distance myself from my thoughts, but he pulls me back. Seb says something in French that sounds amused, and the sweet scent of Calvados reaches my nose. The fabric of his cargo shorts is bumpy against my thin leggings.

  “We didn’t find anything this morning,” I whisper, conscious of how close our faces are. His palms are warm on my arms. “We’re no closer to discovering how or why she disappeared or . . .” Tears fill my eyes, betraying the careful stoicism I’ve been wearing in public.

  Large thumbs caress my cheeks. Seb whispers in a soothing tone, “Je suis là, ma belle.”

  The poetic sound distracts me as he pulls me to his lips. What starts out as a soft kiss deepens, becomes a passionate embrace; in the background, a street performer with an accordion plays a haunting song, and I lose myself for a moment. How long has it been since I’ve connected with someone? After my parents died, I collapsed, isolating myself in my childhood home, unable, until recently, to muster the enthusiasm to continue pursuing medical school, set adrift even from my own sister, who’d lashed out at me. I’ve been craving connection with someon
e even if my practical side has never acknowledged it.

  His tongue forces my mouth open and explores me, one palm gripping my neck, the other clutching my hip. Greedy kisses penetrate my skin, sending a tremor to my thighs. My back arches, and he moans into my neck, “Mon Angèle.”

  I gasp. All of a sudden his taste is sharp, cloying. I pull away, registering only that Seb’s wide eyes mirror my horror.

  Down the street I run, faster, like the thief I am. Running like I just kissed my dead sister’s boyfriend. At the river’s edge, I slow to a walk, and the noise of Parisian rush hour drowns my sobs along the boulevard. I force myself to travel a mile on foot before grabbing a cab, to drown my thoughts in honking horns, loud radios, and the conversations of people meandering past.

  Despite my effort to forget them—to pretend they were something less devastating—Sebastien’s mumbled words in French remain clear.

  My Angela.

  Chapter 9

  Day 3, Tuesday

  Each year, the June gloom sweeps into San Diego with lugubrious clouds taking up residence, refusing to leave until July. The June my parents died was unseasonably hot. The clouds entered early, an ominous warning of the dark period to follow, and the gloom made my late-May graduation ceremony a dreary, humid affair, the months that followed downright interminable. It was an endless overcast sky that mirrored my grief exactly. Later that summer, I deferred med school entry, citing a death in the family—two of them. I moved into my parents’ home, because it held all my happy memories left; Angela wanted me to sell it, but I didn’t want to say goodbye to the memory of our parents and our foursome, too. Surfing, gardening, and self-defense classes dominated my days.

  My newfound pursuits distracted me, all right—until five o’clock. Dusk was the first hint loneliness was inbound; the absence of traditions that began during my childhood and lasted well into college was deafening. My mom and dad used to put on Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday—something jazzy—when they came home from their offices after work, and on Fridays my mother always bought peonies, whose fragrant scent lasted through the entire weekend.

  I missed Angela most during those times, when grief would weigh the heaviest. She was the only one who knew the pain I felt. Siblings, for better or for worse, are the only people in the world with whom you share so many experiences, who outlast friends and lovers, who understand you because they witnessed your formative years firsthand. Once, through blurry eyes, I caught a glimpse of myself in a window’s reflection, and for a second—a bittersweet second—I thought it was Angela, come home to surprise me. To cry with me. So we could hold each other. That night was one of the hardest.

  The second year I deferred my medical school admission, I began interning at the local veterans’ hospital on UCSD’s campus. The emptiness lingered. Yet interacting with the world again reinforced the desire to be a part of it—not simply slink along in the shadows. My parents had been killed on impact, their car slamming into the valley below the freeway; modern medicine could not have saved them, even if they’d slammed into a hospital. Watching people benefit from established treatments—casts for broken bones, dialysis, radiation—was reassuring. Consistent. Dependable. The whole experience restored in me a sense of trust and control in life again. This predictability felt like the polar opposite of the emotional chaos I’d been living, losing my parents suddenly.

  Studying oncology this fall was the cornerstone of my plan to move forward. Treating cancer would be fulfillment enough, I was hoping, to ease the perpetual ache I still felt. I wanted to help revive trust and control in the lives of cancer patients and their families, wherever I could, to share with others this newfound sense of balance.

  Sweet idea, thinking I could restore someone else’s family, if not my own. That was before I knew what lay ahead in Paris.

  Warm, buttery flakes of croissant flutter to the ground like dragonfly wings as I inhale another bite. To think, this is the first time I’m eating one, and there’s a bakery right down the street.

  It’s the first time, and my flight leaves in twelve hours.

  A homeless man with pink-rimmed eyes mutters to himself beside Angela’s building’s doorway. It’s the same man as the first night when I went out for soda. In the light of day, he seems even more isolated against the midweek hustle of people hurrying by.

  A woman in athletic gear pauses to watch me from across the street. We lock eyes. She doesn’t bother to check right or left for cars as she steps into the road and heads straight toward me. Valentin’s warning to be on guard—each stranger a potential serial killer—surges in my thoughts, and I drop my croissant in a panic. The woman runs at me—and then a man leaps past me straight into her arms. The couple embraces. A car honks for them to get out of the road, and they stroll away arm in arm. I draw a hand down my face, willing myself to laugh, knowing there’s nothing funny about it.

  My phone buzzes, causing me to jump. I cringe, digging in my messenger bag, already certain it’s another of Seb’s calls. He phoned twice yesterday but didn’t leave a message. When I returned to Angela’s apartment after wandering the city in a daze, a note with an apology was wedged under her door. The scent of his musky cologne lingered in my hair, on my tank top where he rubbed his face against my neck, until I took the hottest shower Angela’s pipes would permit.

  Roaming along, unchaperoned, I came to a few conclusions. The first was that Inspector Valentin was probably not my best source of help. If he’d known the body in the morgue might not be Angela’s—and how could he not?—he’d purposely concealed it from me. The second: Seb is too emotional, and too available. Remembering his suggestion that we go down inside the catacombs, then spend an hour and a half at one of his and Angela’s favorite lunch spots, only proves that he’s treating this like a nostalgia tour—a trip down memory lane with the world’s best substitute for his girlfriend.

  I retrieve my phone and swipe, already dreading his words.

  Shayna, please. I am sorry. Let us continue our search this afternoon. I still have ideas before you leave. It was a mistake induced by alcohol. Completely my fault.

  A hard laugh bursts out of me. No shit. Did Seb really think he was kissing Angela? Who did I think I was kissing? How much of the day’s idiocy was rooted in the Calvados he drank, and how much was me being starved for companionship these last three years? I press a palm to my forehead. Instead of divining with Angela and reaching out for her, I reached for her boyfriend. Emotion chokes my throat, and I take deep breaths through my mouth.

  Two cabs have passed by. Three SUV taxis idle within a block, and I walk down until I find one empty. My phone buzzes again. Sebastien Bronn scrolls across the screen, but I silence it as I climb into a car.

  After my shower, I dived into a folder on Angela’s laptop that I’d only glanced through before. One document within it listed articles to read, followed by books and encyclopedias, with half the titles already crossed out. Another spreadsheet logged the time she spent in the catacombs over the last year, with increasing visits over the last six months. There was a folder of images relating to the ossuaries, some in sepia tone, some clearly modern, presenting dapper-looking officials and fatigued workers. Another, entitled TO BE USED, contained her own photographs shot within the tunnels. In one photo, tibia bones formed a deep-set shelf blending into a wall of ribs. Angela was always territorial; despite having access to images online, she would have wanted the photos in her thesis to be her own.

  When we were kids, Angela had this exquisite designer doll, the kind that goes for hundreds of dollars, and which I secretly loved. Our mother had it customized to match our features, half Asian, half white, fairly assuming I wouldn’t want my own doll since I’d shunned the usual Barbies Angela played with. But this one looked like me, like us, and so I loved her.

  One day, Angela caught me playing with it. What do you think you’re doing?

  I had looked up from my bed, where I was giving the doll her one-year checkup, imitating w
hat I thought our parents did for work. Playing doctor. Want to? I wasn’t far off—my dad was a family practitioner and my mom was an obstetrician.

  That’s not what doctors do, dummy. Nurses do that stuff. And she’s mine. Angela had yanked the doll away, and the foot had smacked me hard in the chin in the process. We each waited for me to cry, but I didn’t. Don’t take my stuff again, she hissed and left my room.

  I’d gotten off easy, in retrospect. Her retribution would come later, when I was most vulnerable, but in that moment I was only pleased I could spend more time with the doll.

  I let my head relax against the cracked leather seat of the taxi and drum an aimless rhythm on the middle armrest. A mini television mounted on the back of the passenger seat blares a human-interest piece on smugglers tattooing their victims.

  Rummaging through Angela’s files turned up only what I’d noticed before—class essays, notes, bills, and e-receipts. Her agenda seems to be the only useful clue to her whereabouts. I withdraw it from my bag and flip to last August. Nour’s address is clearly written in my sister’s cursive, the last letter ending in a curlicue. I unlock my phone to text a reply to Seb.

  Headache. Talk later.

  As soon as I click my phone to black, it begins ringing. Really?

  “Yes?”

  Pause. “Miss Darby, this is Jean-Luc Fillion. Is this a bad time?”

  The embassy liaison. “Oh. I mean, no, now is fine. What can I do for you? I don’t have any bitch work today.” I’m smiling, but I don’t think it’s audible.

  Jean-Luc gives a polite laugh. Ha-ha. Not enthusiastic but not offended. “Just wanted to follow up and see how your visit was going,” he says. “You’re flying out this evening, right? I’m still happy to help in any way until then.”

  “If I need something, I’ll reach out. Thank you.” I hang up, dismissing the urge to beg him to come with me to Nour’s. Although Seb is suddenly a world of confusion—revulsion—for me, I shouldn’t dismiss his idea to visit her/him. There’s no time left for wavering. To borrow from one of Angela’s favorite figures in history, Winston Churchill—if you’re going through hell, keep going.