Until the Lease Runs Out

Paris sounded wrong.

I noticed it before I noticed anything else, before the gray, before the cold that came through the jet bridge and found the gap between my collar and my neck. Charles de Gaulle at six in the evening should have been loud, and it was, but it was the wrong kind of loud. Guarulhos roars. Everyone talks at once, everyone's cousin is waiting with a sign, someone is always laughing at a volume that makes the security guards look up. Here the noise was flat and tidy, a carpet of rolling suitcases and announcements in three languages that came down from the ceiling like weather. Nobody shouted. Nobody hugged anybody in the middle of the walkway so that you had to go around them. A woman beside me at baggage claim said "pardon" to a pillar.

I stood there with my hands in the pockets of a jacket my sister had told me was not warm enough, and I clapped once, softly, just to hear it.

Bad habit. Professional habit. My father used to say I'd clap at my own funeral to check the acoustics of the church. The sound went out from my hands and died almost immediately, swallowed by low ceilings and carpet and the bodies of two hundred tired people. Short decay. Dead room. Of course it was. Airports are designed so you can't hear yourself think, because if you could, you'd turn around and go home.

The woman who'd apologized to the pillar was staring at me.

"Sorry," I said, and then, because I'd practiced it on the plane for eleven hours, "Pardon."

She nodded the way you nod at a man who claps at luggage carousels, and moved three steps to her left.

My first suitcase came out early. My second came out last, after a stroller, a set of golf clubs and a box wrapped in so much tape it could have survived reentry, and by the time it arrived I'd already decided it had been lost, and that this was a sign, and that I should call my mother and tell her the whole thing was a mistake. It wasn't lost. It just had my whole life in it, and my whole life apparently weighed thirty-one kilos and had to be dragged off the belt by a man in a high-visibility vest who said something to me in French I chose to interpret as "Welcome."

I checked the side pocket before I did anything else. Through the canvas I could feel the shape of it, round and heavy and cold. My father's bell. Or the padaria's bell, which in our family had always been the same thing.

Still there. Good.

I looked at the watch on my wrist, which was his too, and which ran five minutes fast because he'd liked to be early to everything except the doctor. 18:14. So, 18:09. I'd told the host I would arrive around eight. Plenty of time.

That was the last time that day I was right about anything.